Met Shel Israel in Toronto last night!

Tonight, I finally met Shel Israel, the author of the book Naked Conversations. He’s a really nice guy, and he was invited as part of the AIMS conference in Toronto. When I first approached him, I was going to say something, but he beat me to it, and said “Are you Albert”. At first, I thought he meant Alvin, and I was like, man, how does he know me? Did he read my blog? I thought that’s impossible. He said “Were you at the conference in California?” To which I replied, “No, I just came back from a conference in San Sebastian, Spain”. He then replied to me (well not in these exact words, but I am paraphrasing), “Spain is nice, much warmer than here”. Then, that’s how we started talking to each other.

I brought my copy of the Naked Conversations book, and asked him to sign it for me, which he graciously did. It took him a long time to sign, because he was holding the book while talking to another person. But he did sign it.

I then told him I was a PhD student at University of Toronto and doing research on finding communities in blogs using social network analysis and clustering techniques and building a quantitative framework for evaluating blogs (like creating a eBay rating was one lady who was beside me who chimed in) and that hopefully this would be part of my PhD thesis. He then replied “That’s great, you can do that as part of a PhD?” But, he was certainly intrigued about my research in finding communities. He said that I was a smart fellow (wow, that coming from Shel Israel, I think I made an impact). I told him to check out my blog and we exchanged business cards. Then, I asked the lady whom I met to take a picture of me with Shel.



There were lots of people at the event that was held at Shoeless Joe's in Toronto. I took some pictures of the crowd as you can see below.





Here's a picture of the organizer of the event, who managed to get Shel to come to the blogging dinner as well as to the AIMS conference.