TechCrunch Party Highlights

Had a blast at Friday’s TechCrunch BBQ party.

Some highlights worthy of note:

Drove down with Kevin Burton, late of Rojo, now bootstrapping TailRank, a blog recommendation engine. In a true act of kindness, Dave Winer gave Kevin a $20 for a “golden ticket” (i.e., beta invite) to TailRank; yes, Dave has millions, but it was a totally spontaneous act of kindness (caught on camera — scroll to the bottom) that was great to see (I’m the red eye peeping out from behind Kevin’s left shoulder, lol). Nice!

Speaking of Dave and cameras, here I am (striped button down shirt) chatting with him, Matt and Eleanor. This is moments after standing around with Dave and Marc talking about structured blogging (Marc’s digging in deep) and OPML (Dave’s charging forward), watching those two catch up and banter; it’s nice to know someone can bust Marc’s chops. 😉

I got to meet Tara Hunt of riya (fka Ojos). riya is building one of several pieces I evangalized heavily while I was leading product at Ofoto (now “Kodak EasyShare Gallery”, blech); namely, auto face recognition and meta-data tagging of consumer images. Finger’s crossed for a alpha/beta invite (cough, wink).

Speaking of Tara, she unknowingly solved our strategic oil crisis. Look, all we’ll ever need, right there on my and Scoble’s foreheads! 😉 (Ah, the side-effects of a 1.21 jigawatt flash.)

Last but not least, I had the pleasure of having a great conversation with Matt Marshall of SiliconBeat fame. His writing doesn’t do him full justice (and that’s saying a ton); make an effort to hunt him down and talk with him in person.

Oh yeah, I also demoed the health search engine that could… and learned that Google might be working on a PHR/EMR app (interesting…).