Lunched with Caterina Fake today. Yes it is pronounced fake. She was at the GEL conference which focusses on understanding what creates "experience" with her husband who was giving a talk here. I saw her blog on Thursday where she mentioned she was coming to stay on Amsterdam Avenue and W. 77th St. I live on West 95th Street. So I emailed her and she picked it up here on airport right in the middle of the steet. Then a lot of phone tag and we met. She even let me interview her! Caterina was a sparkling, sprightly, elegant presence with a sly sense of humor, much prettier than her picture on Caterina.net, and a veritable font of information, know how and history about blogging. We had salad, sandwiches and desert for an hour and a half and it was a joy to see how little in a hurry she was. She had just received my book in the mail before she left and had it with her. We were sitting at an outside cafe in the bright sun and she put on her sunglasses for a few minutes so that sunlight pretty much lasted until it started to rain lightly when she had to leave. She carries her little Apple laptop wherever she goes and she showed me how she opens in on the street and writes in it using wireless access just floating around in the air here on the Upper West Side. We ate outside at a cafe down the block on W.77th Street near the NY Historical Society Building. We could barely stop to eat and breathe, there was so much to talk about, I had so many questions and she seemed to like to listen very carefully too. She told me how she became a blogger at the time that Blogger had 20 blogs, how she had a Diary Site before she started with Blogger in 1999 and then later realized the two were the same thing. She looked at at an article I'm working on about blogging and corrected where I put she gets 2000 reads a day to 2000 hits a day! She talked about a blogger at this conference who gets 8000 hits a day and how some newspapers are uneasy about all this blogging. There are some published articles about her blogging but this will be her first interview in cyberspace. There's so much more to say but I've been working on my links all night and at least I got to write this little note. Lots of bloggers are changing their links and I'm enjoying all this interaction!