Saturday night saw Ben and I make our way to the BBC Backstage Christmas party and what a good night was had! It has been a long time since I last went to an event like this so my networking skills were low but the only way to improve is to just damn well Do It so here is the obligatory blog report.

As well as free beer, some great spicy food and a huge cake provided by trustedplaces.com I got to meet Matt again after a long time out of contact. and it was weird to know that he has been reading this blog. In fact the phrase “Ah yes, I read about that on your blog” was oft heard throughout the evening.

As someone who is a bit of a lurker on the ORG mailing list it was a pleasure to finally meet Suw Charman. it was great to talk to her about digital rights and politics and hopefully we managed to get something interesting out of the meeting, but I will leave that to Ben to talk about…

I also met David who, after some conversational games, turned out to be working with another friend of mine who wasn’t at the bash. There were lots of similar joining of dots going on around us as people networked away and I hope to see some interesting projects come out of the party.

Meeting Ben’s OSS Advocate friend Dave was interesting, albeit brief, but it was good to finally meet him and I hope to see him again and talk properly with him.

To the Reading student who was convinced that I had been seen around other similar events I can safely confirm that going Core Duo isn’t one of my skills so it was the first time that we had met – but I look forward to your blog going non-beta…

The goody bag at the end had the mandatory T-Shirt and a copy of the latest Make Magazine which I am seriously considering taking a subscription out for – the first time in a long time that I have even come close to wanting to do so for a technology magazine.

Finally, many thanks to all the people who were involved with making sure that this party became reality. I had a fantastic time!

Oh, and Twitter really needs metadata, but I’m not sure I grok the idea of it too well…

Photo is from cubicgarden’s Flickr Photostream.