Networking With The Sacramento Connect Networking People

Left: I go down this way?


In May, I decided to accept the Sacramento Bee's invitation to become part of their Sacramento Connect community of bloggers. Part of what I do, and I'm sure part of what the other bloggers do too, is to function as reporters for those aspects of the Sacramento area that we know about. It is only reasonable that, as reporters, we should affiliate in some kind of loose alliance with Sacramento's largest newspaper.

Nevertheless, I was a little apprehensive about accepting their invitation to meet them in person:

Join us for a Sacramento Connect Mixer! As one of our partners, you'll have the opportunity to meet The Bee team, and preview the upcoming beta release of Sacramento Connect. Afterwards, enjoy networking, light appetizers and wine. We hope to see you, here!

To me, blogging is sort of a solitary activity; an opportunity to mentally babble in cyberspace. To meet other cyberbabblers in the flesh seemed contrary to the spirit of the activity. It would be sort-of like attending a convention of spies (HELLO. My name is Boris Badenov. Have you seen Moose and Squirrel?)

Left: Revolution Winery entrance.


But we are all in this together, I guess, so Tuesday evening I headed down to Revolution Wines on P Street, just a short distance from the Sacramento Bee. The invitation instructions directed that we should enter the winery from the alley between Q & P Streets, but interestingly, there was a woman whose sole job seemed to be that of waving people off and directing them to enter the winery from the front (strange job, that).

Left: Network, network, network!


There were some forty people within the winery. A noisy fan and A/C system helped tamp temperatures down a bit.

After two free glasses of wine and some hor d'oeuvres, even my laconic self seemed to relax a bit. I talked at length with the folks who run five separate blogs of the sixty-or-so Sacramento Connect partners:

Nanny Goat In Panties (Margaret Andrews)
Breast Cancer?....But Doctor I Hate Pink! (Ann Silberman)
Sue's Dog Blog (Sue Owens Wright)
The Farmer Fred Rant (Fred Hoffmann)
Plus a fifth blog.... What was it called? My memory is shot! It was that wine!

Nanny Goat In Panties is one blog I've been reluctant to go to before now, because my blog and hers are often nearly-tied on Bressler's Sacramento Top 25, and I was afraid any link through the the Top 25 would give her an unassailable lead in the oh-so-important biweekly competition for ratings. Nevertheless, I agree with her that we all have more to gain by linking to and with each other than by each keeping to ourselves. The prime directive here is Network!

I recognized several other notables in the crowd, but didn't have time to network with them....

Left: Souvenir Revolution wines in very nice bags.


The Sacramento Bee folks gave a short presentation where they discussed various infrastructure initiatives and improvements. As a content provider, I found the buzzwords a bit formidable, but it all sounded good. Heading out to the Improv Workshop about 7:00 p.m., I picked out a bag containing a free bottle of wine as a souvenir. Tomorrow they are hosting some kind of virtual wine tasting, but as a wine naif I'm not sure my input would be especially revealing (This wine is dark red, unlike the White Zinfandel. This wine isn't sweet, unlike the White Zinfandel. Funny, nothing here tastes like the White Zinfandel. It's almost like there are more kinds of wine in the world than White Zinfandel....)

So, all hail networking and infrastructure!