Now, raucus festivities in celebration of blogging would be nothing more than shameful without a few blog posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) about them, would they? My contribution follows.

I found my way to the Bainbridge Blogger Bash by a fortunate Flickr coincidence: I can’t quite remember how, but I discovered Julie Leung’s photostream and marked her as a contact. Soon enough, she had noticed our geographical proximity and had extended a kind invitation to the meetup for webloggers on our rock that she was planning at the end of the month.

I showed up late and nervous, having minutes before pulled banana muffins out of the oven. (Please feel free to skip these parentheses if you are not interested in the muffins; all of the sentences they contain are on the subject of muffins. First, for attendees of the Bash, the muffins were vegan. I neglected to inform you of this, but it seems like something you might like to be aware of. Second, I modified the recipe slightly to great effect. Notes on these modifications are on the recipe entry.) I expected to know none of the attendees personally and further that they would all have at least a generation on me. I was approximately correct on the latter point, but the former was disproved when I encountered Dave Henry, whom I can’t recall having laid eyes upon for upwards of seven years. He’s moved on to bigger, better, and appropriately more ambitious things since then. Namely, he’s scaled to international trade.

From there, I began to get a sense for the group as a whole. With some exception, the guests were not as technically oriented as I had led myself to believe that they would be. Dave and Philippe Boucher noted that their interest in the phenomenon of the weblog was decidedly non-technical in nature — the general focus of the group was on the social definition of the weblog as opposed to the technical implementation.

This is not, of course, to give you, dear reader, the impression that the gathering was devoid of nerdiness. Geekery was present in abundance. To illustrate this, I need only observe that our name tags, whose materials were graciously provided by the hosts, contained two items of information: or names and our URLs. The practice of identifying oneself by one’s Web address was inspiring. My name tag has found its temporary home on the door to my room, but may eventually make its way back to my shirt in the near future.

While Ted Leung, the drive-by spammer who knew my software before my name, interjected witticisms, I got to know Philippe and Chip Gibbons. I briefly discussed the obligatory college matter with Ed Hager and considered with the disgracefully English and clever Chris Holmes swapping my given name for that of my photo-sharing service. Others (like Mike Houser and Molly and Walker Willingham) I had to observe from a distance — two hours, it seems, truly can fly.

To paraphrase my logorrhea, I had a surprisingly and relentlessly good time. Next time, Gillon, Sarah, Sean, et al?