Nerds Are Taking over Hollywood and Santa Monica

By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

There was a time that I would party five nights a week (Cat Club, Coconut Teaser, The Rainbow, The Troubadour, and The Whiskey) with friends in the clubs of Hollywood. I refer to those times as the rock ‘n roll years. It’s funny how things change, but continue to remain the same, here on the west side of Los Angeles. The parties have never stopped, I suppose I just got involved in another crowd, a group I’d refer to as geeks and gadget holders, web entrepreneurs and online marketers, and social media mavens.

Here it is March of 2008, and there’s been parties and meet ups going on all over the Westside LA area, and it’s the geeks organizing these efforts. They’re taking over clubs, they’re taking over bars, they’re taking up space in places like AOL Beverly Hills, and drinking kegs dry. Not only that, there’s a lot of great social activity going on (not to mention an abundance of sharp people I’ve been pleased to meet).

I’ve never been so happy to call Los Angeles my home. Not only do I get to provide chiropractic care to some of the greatest people in the world, I get to hang out with my gadget carrying friends, and can still enjoy good times in the clubs.

This weekend is a geek fest, and there are three local events worth getting your butts to. Tonight, (Friday night) is a Community Next pre-party, which is hosted at the Air Conditioned Supper Club – 625 Lincoln Blvd., Venice, CA 90291. That’s right in my hood so I won’t be missing out.

Saturday morning is Community Next and The Next Generation of Media and the Web Saturday, March 29, 2008. The event begins at 9 a.m. and speakers include Veronica Belmont (Mahalo Daily), Pete Cashmore (Mashable), Martin Green (Meebo), Alexis Ohanian (Reddit), Robert Scoble (Scobleizer.com/Fast Company), and many others.

The Community Next event wraps up around 5 p.m. which will be followed by another social media meet up event in Hollywood, California, at Seven in West Hollywood. That event is MashMeet LA 2.0 and it begins at 730 p.m. Seven is located at… 7929 Santa Monica Blvd. West Hollywood, CA 90046.

Since Planet Chiropractic beginnings in the 1990s, we’ve been big supporters of open source, and even bigger beneficiaries. The first server that hosted the early Planet Chiropractic website ran on FreeBSD. We now use a combination of Red Hat Linux servers (for Web applications), Fedora servers (our LA staging server), and Ubuntu desktops (in my office, home office and laptop). I’m also a big advocate of WordPress and other open-source platforms and applications.

These events have provided a great way for me to get my geek on and hang out with other like-minded friends. I’ve been in communication with several via my twitter account and I’m hoping to see them all there at one of these weekends events.