Ben Metcalfe

Adaptive Path 5th Party

This post is a little late, as strictly speaking the Adaptive Path 5th Birthday party was on Thursday. But with my tight schedule through LA, I’ve been too busy (and tired) to blog it until now.

It was a fantastic party, with some great people in attendance. In addition to the flowing free drink (which it’s wasted on me) there was also a burrito truck outside and a chocolate fountain! [insert Homer Simpson-style grrrr here].

Yoz, who it turns out is over here working for Ning was found hanging around the chocolate fountain with his colleague Paul Lloyd, who’s also British and doing design work for Ning. “We’re taking over Ning and allowing making it British”, he joked. “S’s instead of Z’s, etc”.

Paul seemed like a really great guy, with lots of buzz and enthusiasm for what he was doing. That’s the kind of guy you want to employ are your start-up, so Ning are lucky to have him (of course, Yoz knows his stuff too).

Adaptive Path’s offices are located in the “blog district” of downtown San Francisco, Six Apart and Technorati have offices on the same or adjoining blocks. I couldn’t help but get pulled over by a few people to talk about the whole Les Blogs thing.

Fortunately people were kind!

Anil Dash of Six Apart had already suggest I come by their offices during my stay, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to make it (Well, I don’t have my flak jacket with me!).

Joking aside, Anil and I had a really interesting talk about some of the ongoing issues around identity management and I also discussed my aspirations for the agreement of a common ‘conversation’ feed standard to semantically represent discussion on individual blog posts.

There’s definitely challenges to introducing such a standard, but it sounds like someone who is independent of Six Apart (MovableType, TypePad, LiveJournal), Automattic (WordPress, WordPress.com), or any of the other blog platform vendors would be best placed to work on this.

Hmmm. Might be something to spend some time on…