Finally found both time and a Net connection to update my blog! I’m in a Net cafe in Florence, two blocks from the Duomo, this big hunk of bricks with some art ‘n’ stuff inside it. It’s been a great trip, but I’ll spare you the details because I’m blogging it for the Boston Globe somewhere around here

I had dinner with Paolo and Monica Valdemarin in Venice, along with the other six members of my family traveling together. Paolo and I know each other through our weblogs and decided to meet in person. (We got a little encouragement from Marc Canter. Thanks, Marc!) We had a great time.

We talked about weblogs as building webs of trust. I met Paolo already knowing him through his weblog. I trusted him before I met him, and I had good reason to trust him. We were able to start talking as if we had been friends for months, which in a sense we had been. The Web is rewiring the real world. Just not fast enough. (Paolo blogged it and some pictures here.)

By the way, Paolo’s Google URL is “paolo”: that’s all you need to search on in order to get his blog as the first hit on Google.

On a semi-related note, Paolo told me that he posted on his blog a few months ago that he’d like a Radio script that would return the first hit on Google for any selected text so that he could more easily link while writing his blog. Within a few hours, two readers had sent him such scripts, one in England and one in Italy. Pretty cool, both as a widget and as an example of the power of this Web thing.

Categories: Uncategorized dw