drankkit: Social Networking, But In Person

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In order to qualify it as a "world tour", social link-sharing engineers at reddit popped up to Toronto as part of their open-bar meet-and-greet tour; the Canadian megalopolis was shoehorned in between New York and Detroit.

Having found myself temporarily in Toronto, I considered it my duty to you, the NowPublic contributors, to meet some of the other movers an' shakers of the online world. I checked the drankkit website for details, hoping that the time and place would be announced in time (Toronto is a massive city, and going bar to bar seemed too daunting a task), and, sure enough, the location was set: the Madison, just a few streets from the apartment that I've nationalized in the name of NowPublic! Nice.

After a stellar dinner in Chinatown, my girlfriend and I made our way up the labyrinthine stairs of the Madison (a few houses converted into a multi-bar pub that's normally populated by U of Toronto students), we were shocked to find ourselves in what seemed to be an empty venue... until we rounded a few corners to find reddit co-founders Alexis and Steve holding court before a clutch of Canuck contributors. Like many sites with user-generated content, it's tough, at first, to tell who is a contributor and who is a staffer. I was instructed to grab a beer and handed this cool pin depicting a grinning alien hoisting a mug of ale.

We chatted a bit about tagging, and how that can create ownership of content, and allow users to filter out what they're looking for (or what they'd rather avoid), and how a given user's linking habits serve as a sort of meta-blog.  

Then the Jager bombs began to fall... (I do it all for you, NowPublic contributors! For you!)

As we made our way to the TTC to get my girlfriend home, we marveled at how A) now there were two subway trains approaching side by side, instead of just one, and B) how every active contributor to a site like NowPublic or reddit is a human being, capable of smiling, shaking hands, and doing tequila shots; not just a series of letters and numerals that make up a username.


So thanks, reddit, for reminding us of that.