I’ve just come back inside one of the most elegant and romantic hotel rooms I’ve ever experienced. A warm rain forced me in from our balcony. I am enjoying this Positano morning view of the Mediterranean from here on the Amalfi Coast. Some things just blow away the joys of blogging.
Paula and I were reunited three days ago in Rome. We spent the week end dropping our jaws at the glory that is Rome. Now, it's vacation time. We are now doing respectively what we love to do. She’s shopping and browsing in the abundant shops nearby and I'm looking at the sea and writing. The Amalfi Coast is in the process of shutting down for the winter. The place is empty, making it great for relaxing and reflecting.
This three-week trip has been more than I expected. It began with lost luggage and a British bloggers dinner, followed by an eight-country, 10-city, sometimes grueling tour that culminated in Rome, where the folks at the US State Department did a stupendous job of connecting me with some incredibly, passionate, talented Italian entrepreneurs who are pioneering social media in this country of 50 million.
I also learned that the State department, of all places, has more than a few really good, hard-working people. If they took the risk of blogging, more of you would know that. I will be forever grateful to the role they played in connecting me with some great people and a few new friends.
There was Marco Palombi, one of the most forward looking technologists I’ve met, who just bootstrapped Tipic, Inc., a blogging platform into an acquisition that rewarded him nicely. Marco thinks that blogging is so obviously on its way to normalization that as a tech pioneer, it is time for him to move on to the next big thing, whatever that is. Then there’s Prof. Roberto Guerrieri, a research genius at Universityof Bologna who joined Marco and me for lunch. Roberto invented the underlying technology for the fingerprint scanner on my ThinkPad. Like, Marco he likes to move on to the next big project. In his case, it is preventing cancer by genetic alteration.
I’ve already mentioned the remarkable Marco Montemagno, founder of Blogosfere, a blogging network, which has a million Italian speaking monthly visitors in this country of 50 million people. Then there was serial entrepreneur Salvo Missi, who started My TV and at the end of 2002, and had one million viewers before anyone had ever even uttered the word “YouTube.”
Perhaps the absolute highlight of this highlight filled trip was my very last event, speaking mostly to bloggers and students in the historic and breathtaking Cntro Studi Americani, an American Library housed in an unbelievably magnificend frescoe and sculpture adorned building. The questions I received from the ver attentive audience told me that Italian are pushing the rock up the hill and into a connected world. While they express dounts about their role in a global connected world, I harbor very few about the rapid progress I witnessed.
There is so much to say and there have been so many people with great stories to share. I will be writing about them after I get back. Internet here is very expensive and my time online will be limited by that as well as my desire to have a real vacation with Paula.
