Bloggers Dinner with Jeremiah Owyang

My quest for discovering my inner geek led me to Bloggers Dinner last night at Highway Inn restaurant organized by my Obi Wan Kenobi, Ryan Ozawa in honor of freshly (temporarily) unplugged, Senior Analyst for Forrester Research, Jeremiah Owyang.

If you’re like my Mom you’re asking yourself, who? And, to be honest I had to do my homework. I knew that Jeremiah was a highly respected figure in the web world meaning he has über geek status, and he was part of Egos.Alltop.com – oh yeah, and he wrote this post about his analysis of Alltop. But, other than that I did a crash course of his blog in the weeks leading up to the dinner. Why? Not because I wanted to fire off random facts portraying one of knowledge, but rather so that I would know or at least have a clue about the possible conversations that would take place.

According to Ryan, Jeremiah wanted to try some authentic Hawaiian food, and Highway Inn was one of the best choices. Sure, we could have visited a buffet at a hotel in Waikiki, but Jeremiah was going for authenticity and the dishes served at Highway Inn are some of the best.

Lilinoe, the kids and I arrived earlier than the scheduled dinner because I was worried that the small venue would fill up quickly with dinner patrons – not part of the almost 15 person guest list for the Bloggers Dinner. The bulk of the group arrived on-time, and we occupied the back wall of tables.

The evening did not lack of conversation or laughter, and we can attribute much of the LOL’s to our server, Mapuana. She shared that she only recently discovered her inner geek via MySpace and we all promised not only to add her as a friend, but introduce her to other social networking sites. If you’re reading this, add Mapuana – she messaged me that since her shift ended last night her friends count doubled, to 14!

For authentic food I recommended that Jeremiah try the na’au and tripe stew; and I picked up some shoyu poke (raw ahi), tako (raw octopus) poke, and raw crab poke for him to sample. I cautioned Jeremiah that while Lilinoe’s favorite dish is na’au and Chelsea can eat two bowls of tripe stew during our visit – it’s not for my stomach. I’m not sure if he tried any of the stews, but he did thank me for the different poke that he enjoyed.

In the spirit of “analysts” here’s mine of Jeremiah:

“Jeremiah Owyang is a kind man. He is genuinely passionate about the web movement, but more importantly is grateful for its progress. It’s his immense gratitude for his knowledge, his experiences, his connections that touched me the most. And, he’s strikingly handsome – with cool dude hair.”

Readers of his blog will by now know that after 900 consecutive days of being plugged in, as of this writing he should have kept his promise to himself and be completely unplugged for the next handful of days. I wish him all the best in his personal quest – I couldn’t do it during my last vacation to Arizona or Nevada.

Here’s a “social media merging with new media” guest list.