Keith Pleas provides more details on Susi Johnston's relief efforts. Turns out she played a key role in the recovery work from the Bali bombing and that team is now using their skills to help out in the Tsunami disaster.

By the way, look at the way technology is being used. If you look at her pictures you'll see a combination of Apple and Microsoft technologies (Apple Macs, Microsoft Office and MSN Spaces). Has our world changed because of these little plastic and silicon boxes we all type into? I need to look no further than Susi's blog to understand just how much the world has changed in a very short amount of time.

Thanks Keith for helping Susi out and thanks to everyone who is doing something to help out their fellow human beings in this time of need. I'm very happy to be part of an industry that is competing this week, not over market share, but on how much they can do to help.

And, with that, let's head into 2005 and try to make this world a better one together.

More fun photos from geek dinner last night. Thanks to Michael Eakes for posting those. Yes, I do carry Nine Guys pretty much everywhere I go. :-)

Happy New Years. Comment Spam is totally making my comments useless. Dave is working on it, though. Will give me a tool to mass delete these #$%*ers.

If I can't beat them, I'll turn off this system and move my comments somewhere else. It's that bad.

Anyway, I'm not gonna spend my New Years' eve worrying about this. So, they'll win for the next day or so. It's been just that kind of year. I can't wait for 2005.

Be safe and happy. See ya next year! Oh, wait, it is next year already in lots of the world.

Rageboy (aka Christopher Locke aka Clief Blogging Officer) cracks me up with his "Fortune News Flash: No Escape from Bog Lemmings.")

Someday when I have real talent I'll be like Rageboy.

Jeff Jarvis is on MSNBC today and is looking for more Tsunami links to talk about on air.

Mark Cuban has it right: cancel the inauguration parties and donate the money to Tsunami victims. Last I heard they are spending $40 million on the inauguration, while so far our government has pledged $35 million to relief efforts. Unfortunately, there's one catch: the money for the parties has already probably been spent so if you cancel now there wouldn't be $40 million, but there probably would be some left over.

Update: President Bush announced today the amount is now $350 million.

My link blog is down, my comments are filled with spam, so I'm just gonna take the day off. 2004 has been that kind of year. Hopefully 2005 will be better. Maryam and I will be here tonight. Have a good one!

Steve Broback said I could give my readers a special invite to come to the Blogger Business Summit for $395. Now, compared to other blogger events that's expensive. But, since Maryam and I used to plan conferences I can tell you no one is gonna get rich off of this price level. Most of the conferences I held charged more than $1000 and only made money if more than 600 attendees showed up.

If you go with hotels or conference centers the fees are extensive.

Renee Blodget has a nice writeup and photos from last night's dinner and party. Thanks to everyone who came! I wish I had more time to talk to everyone. Even so, I didn't have any dinner because I was too busy. Whew.

Maryam loved the photo of the female bloggers, by the way. She said "now, if it were four computers surrounding you, then I'd be jealous." Hey, Matthew Mullenweg threw a "party after the party" and he had three monitors we were all drooling over.

Jeff Jarvis has some really emotional links to blogs about the tsunami tragedy.

If you follow my photo blog, you'd see that I had quite a day today. Nonstop. It started in the morning when I met with Tom Conrad, CTO of Savage Beast. They make the music stations for Best Buy and Borders. Really cool stuff. Tom is an ex-Mac head (worked on the finder team at Apple for a while) but his PC confused me for a while. His screen looked like an OSX screen, but his monitor was a Dell one. Turned out he had customized Windows XP to look like a Mac. Ahh, yeah, my boss likes doing that too.

The system that Savage Beast has built is quite interesting -- it's an all-Internet Explorer application (doesn't look like one, though). They've been paying musicians to come in and categorize thousands of songs. When you search for, say, Eminem now, it'll also suggest other similar songs and artists. Really cool stuff. I can't wait to try this in a real store. He says you'll see their system at some Best Buys and Borders now with more coming soon.

That was this morning in Oakland. Then for lunch I took a trek across the bay to Palo Alto where I met Jeff Clavier and his family for brunch (he's an investor/entrepreneur -- used to do VC for Reuters). You can see a picture of what they served for lunch. Great French food. Interesting conversations about photo sharing industry (he's consulting for Buzznet -- someone really needs to do a comparison of all these photo sharing sites).

After lunch I headed up to Technorati where they gave me an "extreme geek makeover" and sat around a table giving me tons of ideas (and sucking my brain for some of my own).

One thing that Dave Sifry, CEO/founder of Technorati, showed me is the real time monitor of their network. They've worked hard to get the stability and responsiveness of the network up. It's weird watching in live time as their spider munches through blogs. Dave said they are seeing more than 20,000 new blogs per day right now (showed me a graph). That's just wild.

What I was struck with was the collaborative work method they had. They don't have cubes or offices. They all sit in one area and throw ideas back and forth at each other.

They also are able to deploy new code to their servers and test and react very quickly.

After that, it was onto dinner. I'll let other people write that up. I met so many people and had so many micro conversations that not much is sticking in my head. If this space keeps growing, though, it's going to be very hard to have a dinner in one place next year, though. We took over almost the entire restaurant this year.

I'm going to bed now. This was a great way to send 2004 out.

Here's the pics:

Tom Conrad

Brunch at Jeff Clavier's house

Jeff playing on his own Audiovox SmartPhone

Tantek Celik (left) and Kevin Marks at Technorati

David Sifry, founder of Technorati

The dinner tonight was lots of fun. Here's a list of who was there. In order of when they entered in their name and blog on my Tablet PC. Oh, and, yes, Tantek, I am adding XFN notation for each to the HTML here.

Robert Scoble | Steve Gillmor | Steve Sloan | Dori Smith | Farida Paramita | Michael Eakes | Dan Gould | Christopher Carfi | Masha Solorzano | Scott Rafer | Dan Farber | Lisa Canter | Marc Canter | Mimi Canter | Lucy Canter | Lyndon Wong | Ron Lichty | Tom Conrad | Marc Novakowski | Pierre Wolff | Nadeem Bitar | Kaliya Hamlin | Brian Hamlin | Ian Jones | Nicole Lee | Kevin Marks | Thomas Hawk | Neal Drumm | Tony Chang | Zack Rosen | Kieran Lal | Jasmeet Singh | Jason DeFillippo | Ian Kallen | Kevin Burton | Brad Neuberg | Renee Blodgett | Jeff Minard | Om Malik | June Parina | David Sifry | Jonas M Luster | Micah Alpern | eleanor kruszewski | Jim Grisanzio | Tantek Celik | Rebecca Eisenberg | Curtis Smolar | Russell Beattie

Thomas Hawk: Proof That "A" List Bloggers Get All the Chicks.

Hmm, how will I explain this one to Maryam?