Geoff Livingston and I are planning Washington DC's premiere Unconference (more definitions here and here). Naturally, it's called BlogPotomac.

Update: why are we doing this? DC has a large but fragmented community of social media experts, practitioners, entrepreneurs, VCs, etc. We want to pull this community together and learn from each other. Plus, in Geoff's words, "We don’t want to fly out to Silicon Valley all the time."

Here's our unscripted kick-off at a local Starbucks. We're both Georgetown alums (Geoff is a CCT alum; I'm an IEMBA grad) so we're hoping we can use Georgetown University as a venue. Tentative date: April 2008. Stay tuned!

I'm really glad that local blog celeb Geoff Livingston, author of the soon-to-be released Now Is Gone, inspired me to attend last night's kickoff for A Spoonful of Sin. ASOS is a monthly subscription service, founded by Kelly Harman, that delivers "tastings" of decadent desserts by Washington DC's best chefs.

Former White House Executive chef Roland Mesnier was on hand, as were a good number of local area women executives, some of them bloggers. I had the chance to chat with Qui Diaz and Kaitlyn Wilkins (both work for Ogilvy PR).

The…

Eileen Yu of ZDNet Asia interviewed Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz at the company's Menlo Park, CA campus recently. Here's a snippet of the Q & A. Schwartz puts his finger on what may be the hardest thing about a corporate blog - finding a voice:

Q: Now that you're blogging as a Fortune 500 CEO, has that changed the thought process you go through as you write?

A: I probably think a lot more carefully now about what I would write. The hardest blog (entry) to write is... the first. You haven't found your voice, you don't…

UPDATE: I failed to make the distinction below as to *who* would benefit more from Jobs'  non-interactive, non-apology apology letter. Apple, of course. Not users or consumers.

Total control of the user experience (links to David Carr's Media Equation column in the New York Times, Sept. 10, 2007) is part of Apple's overall strategy.

The below was, frankly, an off-the-cuff riff. Not as well thought out as it should be. But ahhh... such is the reality of blogging. So if you'll forgive my somewhat muddled thinking, here's the original post:

The big news this week is that…

This seems like the perfect way to get back into blogging. Today's Wall Street Journal has a great article that, I suspect, will resonate with many readers: How I Spent Squandered My Summer Vacation (registration required). One of the things at the top of my list was to learn Chinese (OK, a few phrases) via fluenz (a DVD) and chinesepod (a podcast and online lessons). Confession: I didn't do it.

But heck, according to the WSJ, neither did comedian Andy Borowitz learn Italian before a planned trip to Italy next month. Instead, he ate pizza several times as…