Advercation = Advertising + Education

Dan Beyer of the Washington Post’s “The Washbiz Blog” recently covered the MashMeet Remix DC party in an article titled “A Celebrite, a Party, and Web 2.0″ . While the sponsors, organizers an others mentioned in the article are undoubtedly  are grateful for the coverage, there have been rumblings for an number of folks in the DC tech community regarding the WaPo’s continued inability to dig deep into this ’scene’ and understand what is really going on.  I have pasted by comment to the article below, which gives a quick insight into what I, and a number of others, believe is the true nature of this market:

Dan, I think it’s great that the hometown paper of record is starting to see/cover the fruits of what the extensive tech community here in DC has been working on.  What we have not been working on though is “trying to build a Web 2.0 community for more than a year” nor have we been “trying to show that D.C. can be, if not Silicon Valley, a major presence for social networking Web sites, user generated content and cutting-edge Web apps.”

What we are actually doing is BEING the change that you see in technology today.  There are no aspirations here in DC to be the valley, or to be a community. WE ARE a very tight nit community of intelligent, passionate and driven individuals effecting the digital sphere nationally and internationally and love DC’s tech scene for what it is – a kickass crowd of folks that are as good at what they do as people in other leading tech meccas.

I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to meet at the event, and I look forward to meeting you at some point soon.  Thank you for covering mashmeet remix dc and the other events we find so crucial to DC’s continued success as a vibrant tech community.

Peter Corbett
www.istrategylabs.com