The Geek Dinner this evening with Chris Anderson. On a warm night, we took over the tables outside and monoplised the venue until after closing time.Chris’s talk was a short overview of his theory and then the floor was opened to questions. Both Ian and Kosso videoed the Q&A session, which is just audible over the buses. There were a lot of challenging question, but a deep dive into a net neutrality debate was cut off whilst the definition of net neutrality was still being discussed. For the rest of the evning, Chris was caught up in many conversations and continued to expand on the theme of the book.

It looks like Ian has done his normal superb job in organising a geek dinner. Today, this evening, he has invited Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and author of the Long Tail. I’m lucky enough to be in the UK for this, so definitely going along.

There’s a few events in London this week.

Monday: First is Mobile Monday, the local chapter of what appears to a growing global series of meetings. There’s another get together as well, the London 2.0 Meetup

Tuesday: another mobile meetup – Swedish Beers. This is less formal than Monday, with no panel or Q&A; a good networking event.

Wednesday: There’s a geek dinner with Dave Teton. There’s also a Blogging Demystified event with some of London’s top bloggers being run at the Apple Store.

Thursday seems to be quiet and then Friday has a talk by Ciarán O’Riordan on Software Patents, Copyright Laws, and Open Source Software

Before all of that, this weekend there’s the annual Boat Race, which usually brings out some interesting advertisements…such as this one in today’s Evening Standard. Regardless of the ads, there’s good photo ops along the banks.

I forgot to post this! Went to the Paul Boag Geek dinner last Thursday and had a really good time. THe venue and food were good, and the speach was well worth listening too – Paul did a very good job of answering some challenging questions about web 2.0. The key thing from his speach that stuck with me was his confession about making it up as he went along..and that he thought that many people were in the same boat when it came to standards and accessibility. Good write ups over on Ian’s blog and on Simon;s…who won the trip to SXSW where we made plans to meet up.

The 3rd London Girl Geek Dinner was held last night. About 40 people turned up for networking, chatting, some food, drink, and open mike talks. Jen got up last and gave an impromptu chat show, dragging out confessions of other geekdoms from cooking to interior design. Other talks were from Rachael, (on developing mobile user interfaces) and Bill (on being a jounalist with a CS degree). The open mike format worked well in this case, giving a variety of speakers.

The next one is now planned for April – so keep an eye out for the announcement and come along if you are in London.

Ian has photos on Flickr.

Maryam has a great post on how to survive Geek dinners.

Fortunately you don’t necessarily need all these hints at the London Girl Geek Dinners as it is not all a completely techie crowd, but a bunch of people who display their geekness in many different ways. The next one is on 19th January, so sign up on the wiki.

I’m off to the the Rober Scoble and Hugh MacLeod Geek Dinner tonight. It looks like it will be a different animal to previous ones, as the attendees from the Global Voices summit have been invited.