I guess it was impossible to shake off that South by Southwest geek-turned-rock-star fever. On Wednesday night, New York's new-media nerds had no problem taking center stage at a Chinatown karaoke outing.
Case in point: this video of two dudes and an unidentified female rocking out to Green Day's Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Those guys, in case you don't know 'em, are a pretty big deal. The skinny one who looks like he should be fronting a garage band is Tumblr founder David Karp, and the Jimmy Kimmel lookalike is Silicon Alley Insider reporter Dan Frommer (whose bosses are loving the fact that he got caught singing on camera).
Want backstory? It's really quite a nice peek into the workings of New York's oft-bizarre tech community.
Serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, currently at the helm of human-powered search site Mahalo, was in town to keynote at the Search Engine Summit conference. Through Twitter and Facebook, he organized a dinner outing with a few dozen local tech personalities to a restaurant in Chinatown, and afterwards, I think everybody planned on going home and playing with their computers. We're geeks, after all.
But as the stragglers were getting ready to head out, a Dodgeball alert (believe it or not, a fair number of people in the New York tech scene never abandoned the where-you-at Dodgeball service for the more messaging-oriented Twitter) came in from Dealbreaker editor John Carney. He was headed to Mott, a karaoke bar a few blocks away, and wanted some backup singers. Nobody hesitated to join up. (Maybe it was because video blog hotties Julia Allison and Meghan Asha, who are working on a Web show together, were in attendance, and the dudes wanted to impress them.)
Those in the know may recall that Carney had reportedly gone all High Noon on Calacanis when the Santa Monica, Calif.-based tech personality was in town for a charity benefit a few months ago. But Carney and Calacanis appeared to have no hard feelings between them on Wednesday night, and hugged a lot. And then there was Karp and Frommer's stunning karaoke duet. Also seen in the video: Carney (the blond guy in the suit jacket) and Valleywag's Nicholas Carlson poking his face into the camera.
Carlson was unable to achieve his goal of getting Calacanis to belt out some Frank Sinatra. Oh, well. I'm sure there will be a next time.