Chris Meller

I’ve started to realize lately, mainly through links of Mark Jen and Scoble, that most of the tech stuff definitely takes place in the Silicon Valley area. Not just the conferences and conventions, either. There are all kinds of geek dinners and blog lunches taking place. And while there are cases where certain people are invited, a common theme here is “open to the public”. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you want to show up and talk geek with them, they’re happy to share a few drinks with you.

So my question is: when was the last time you heard about something like this going on in other cities? People are driving hours to be to these things along the west coast, yet the phenomenon seems to be totally contained to it. I don’t have any blogs in my RSS aggregator that are written by people in Atlanta or New York or Miami, and I’ve never heard of a blog lunch or dinner taking place in these places, much less smaller cities along the east coast.

This brings up the question: Is it really Silicon Valley or Nowhere?

Of course there are programmers and network engineers and administrators making bushels of money just about everywhere, but is everything still so self-contained in sunny California that you have to migrate west to really accomplish anything or become part of the bigger picture? Microsoft has branch-offices all over the country, but when was the last time you heard about one in North Carolina doing something revolutionary? Everything comes out of Redmond, just like everything for the rest of the computer industry comes out of Silicon Valley.

Is it just me, or have others noticed this trend? Am I wrong? Do you know of gatherings like this that take part elsewhere? Anyone know of ones going on in the Atlanta area, or better yet, South Carolina? Yeah, I didn’t think so…