I just returned from an amazing dinner with some insanely inspirational people. I had the opportunity to sit, eat and chat with Om Malik, Frank Gruber, Ryan Carson and his wife, Brian Williams, Gary and AJ Vaynerchuk and Gary’s wife, Tim Ferriss, the organizers of the New New Internet Conference, James Surowiecki, Rohit Bhargava and a number of other highly inspirational people.

I have never had the opportunity to sit down and chat with such a world class set of people. The best part about it was chatting about the future of the web and the amazing opportunity that is still available to all of the people that choose to be part of the industry. I am extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to sit and chat with these individuals. I wanted to share with all of you some of the lessons that I learned in the brief discussions that I had with this dynamic set of individuals:

• 99 percent of people aren’t going to try as hard as you will. If you truly have that burning desire, anything you want is within reach if you are willing to work for it.
• Link to the people that you aspire to be and eventually they will begin to pay attention to you. If they don’t, do whatever it takes to make sure that they do.
• Your blog titles may be the most important thing when writing an article.
• No matter how successful you become, always be willing to help others. It will come back to you a million fold.
• Try try again. On the web, there is so much opportunity that not a single one of us can pursue all of the things we want to try. If the first thing you launch doesn’t work, launch something new; eventually something is bound to work.
• When you finally figure out something that works, start monetizing it immediately. Many people fail because they don’t successfully monetize something that is already working.
• As Napoleon Hill says, you need to work yourself into a white heat of desire. Be extremely passionate about what you are doing.
• Finally, pick one thing and conquer it. Spreading yourself thin will only result in disaster.

I cannot express enough thanks to Frank Gruber who informed me of the pre-event happy hour. Thank you so much! I’m looking forward to the conference tomorrow. I hope to be posting about it either on this blog or on AllFacebook tomorrow.

Robert Scoble seems to have the impression that P.R. people provide Mike Arrington with breaking news on a regular basis. When it comes to product reviews he may be right. The only reason for this? Mike doesn’t have aggressive competition. That’s the difference between new media and old media and under Scoble’s description TechCrunch is becoming old media.

Prior to new media, newspapers were simply handed “breaking stories” by P.R. representatives. That’s no longer the case. For example, say that you are friends with the CEO of a large company and you run your own media company. If you talk to that person on a regular basis, chances are they are going to give you the story before anybody else. Breaking news now comes from (and may have always come from) building strong relationships with your sources. Additionally, investigative reporting helps to provide breaking news as well.

If you want to win in the new media landscape you better be aggressive. Rather than fighting for access to the P.R. representatives, you should be fighting for access to other employees within the organization. It sounds like some of these new media people have become spoiled with “access” to higher quality press releases. They are still press releases though. The real juicy scoops don’t come from building relationships with the communications department, it comes from knowing other people in the company. The bottom line here is that building relationships with people is going to beat out any form of informal public relations. It’s as simple as that. A combination of intelligence and aggresion will put you on top.

Robert Scoble has posted about the number of Google subscribers each of the Techmeme leaderboard blogs have. For some reason though my subscription count in Google reader is showing up as only 196. According to feedburner though, I have thousands of RSS subscribers of which over 52% are using Google reader. That would result in 1000+ subscribers to my AllFacebook.com feed. I have a feeling these numbers are a bit off.

This is definitely a good linkbait article though. Techcrunch has posted about this as well. I’m going to take these numbers with a grain of salt. Instead, I’m going to focus on the number of the Techmeme leaderboard as well as within technorati. Also, daily traffic should be a pretty good measure as well.

I have been working feverishly over the past couple weeks. I am preparing to launch a new company. I previously wrote about working on Facebook development. I have decided instead to spend most of my time blogging instead. I will be launching something new in the coming weeks. I’ll post about it on here and on AllFacebook.

I haven’t been writing as frequently on here since I have been busy with AllFacebook. That trend is probably going to continue as I am planning on launching something new. I’m extremely excited about it though and I will continue to write about my experience with the launch on this blog. I also will ocassionally cover some random web related issues as well. Thanks for understanding!

According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the D.C. metro area has the second highest concentration of I.T. professionals in the U.S. next to Silicon Valley. For all those that are trying to help put the D.C. tech community together, it appears as though this is a pretty good goal given the density. Conversely, it should be noted that just because we have the second highest density of I.T. professional doesn’t mean that we have the second highest volume of startups.

There are a number of large companies whose focus is strictly on I.T. services for the government. I would guess that those companies make up the majority of I.T. professionals in the area, but I don’t have the numbers to back it up. Also, the average salary for someone in the I.T. industry living in the D.C. metro area is approximately $122,950. Not bad! Congrats D.C.!

Dave Winer has published the Techmeme top 100 blogs. If you hadn’t heard already, Techmeme is releasing a new tech blog leaderboard tomorrow. My other blog AllFacebook.com has come in 62 on the list. Not bad for starting the blog a few months ago!

People that rank lower on the scale include Financial Times, USA Today, Mashable!, O’Reilly Radar and Valleywag. It’s pretty awesome to see hard work paying off. Rather than embellishing on it (p.s. I am officially a dork), I’d like to post an overview of how to launch a top blog. I’ll be posting some follow-up posts over the coming days to give a thorough overview.