All I can really say is “Wow.” When the idea to host a tweetup had been thrown around months ago between @loritodd, @Heraldsports and I after I attended the @Sun Sentinel’s first #SoFlaTweetup, we were slow getting started but once the ball started rolling it only took two weeks to see the RSVP list on our twtvite explode.

We were slightly nervous about the attendance, hoping the casual nature of tweetups didn’t result in too many last-minute “I’m-so-swamped, can’t-make-it” replies. But Miami, boy did you deliver. The Miami Herald staff was thrilled to have been able to socialize and meet you all face-to-face, the people behind the voices in our paper and online and the readers who’ve stuck with us through challenging times.

You blew us away by making #HeraldTweetup such a fantastic success.

Most of the other tweetups (RefreshMiami, BarCampMiami) and meetups I’ve attended in Miami have been tech-based, chock-full of geeks and developers, iPhone geniuses and Web designers. The community is flourishing and it’s exciting that the barriers to hang and mingle with these sharp minds are few.  After a while though for us media folks it feels a little over our heads. I’m a tech-groupie, but I can’t talk serious shop with the talented geeks in Miami.

We hope to continue to host tweetups in the future as a vehicle for community interaction, uniting readers from all professions and backgrounds, and hopefully with changes in venue more readers from the tri-county area.

From our estimates about 150 of you fine folk were kind enough to spend your Tuesday night with us at Tobacco Road. You braved the heat, mosquitoes and a standing-room-only setup and for that we cannot thank you enough.

Please, please, please let us know if you have suggestions for future venues or ideas on what we can do to make these continually fun for all of you. Check out The Miami Herald’s South Florida Twitter Directory for more fun peeps to follow and keep checking it regularly, as the list will always be getting new names.

If you have photos from the event, we’d love it if you added them to our Flickr pool (thanks @loritodd!) and keep your eyes peeled for an event video on its way. We’ll tweet it at you.

Here are some of the shots from last night:

What bloggers are saying:

Carlos Miller on old media organizations with new media tricks

Miami Herald Tweetup at Tobacco Road – @ GoLiveMiami.com

Miami Herald Tweetup Round-up! -  @ holy crap my hair is on fire

Finding out that wifi would be offered on board my flight today from LaGuardia to Atlanta will probably be the highlight of my day. I was still under the impression, however, that because wifi on flights is still in a bit of a testing phase that it would be free 0r discounted. $10 for two hours of wifi seemed like a little much but I felt I would be doing myself a disservice by not trying it out. So here I am.

The service is provided by Gogo Inflight Internet and the sign-up process was quick and painless.

So far all pages have loaded at very decent speed. Instant Message chats are working just fine with no glitches. The real test comes in streaming music and sound. Grooveshark loaded in about 15 seconds and the song played flawlessly without having to stop and buffer. Video streaming only started to hiccup toward the end of “I’m on a Boat” on Hulu but righted itself quickly. Multiple tabs and TweetDeck run just fine too.  I wanted to try and Skype with someone to really stretch its legs but didn’t get the chance.

Overall, at least if they are charging $10, you aren’t getting half-ass slow connections. If you really have trouble going a few hours being disconnected and have some disposable income, check it out next time you fly Delta. (This is not an advertisement.)

Related:

• A good overview of each airline’s wireless offerings.
• Great post this week from Wallet Pop on expanding inflight wifi service as of late.

I had a few proud motherly moments during my trip to New York City this weekend.  Not that I’m in any way as cool as Mary’s own mom, but that we’d grown so close that it felt like my own little chickadee was spreading her wings, and that made me happy.

Mary is one of my closest friends and my roommate in college.  We were randomly assigned to the same dorm room for our freshman fall semester at UF and I couldn’t have been luckier to get such an awesome roommate. We lived together for three years in college and now she has thrown caution to the wind and moved to New York City to live out her big-city dreams, and her friends get to come spend a wistful weekend in the city with a free place to stay.

We ate some delectable food. In the East Village we had greasy but authentic savory Venezuelan arepas at Caracas, which tasted even better with a brown-bagged Corona to wash it down.  The place sat about six people total so we munched our dinner in the park.  The next day and right around the corner Colonel Sanders was put to shame by the fried chicken I had at The Pink Tea Cup. Soul food at its finest. What I was most looking forward to as far as pleasing my palate was concerned were the famous cupcakes of Magnolia Bakery.  They were good but a little dense and crumbly for my liking.  It’s hard to knock a bakery that cranks out fresh cupcakes until 12:30 at night.

Other than that we mostly just moseyed around, shopped and people-watched. The feelings of independence I gathered from living out Mary’s life in the city with her, even if it was only for three days, was just the motivation I needed and wanted to get out of my short trip.

It’s amazing what can happen when you tell a story different ways. Ben Jervey, reporter for Good Magazine, knows that the United States’ rail system isn’t much to write home about compared to it’s international counterparts. But why? He jumped on the Amtrak for the 3,397-mile journey from New York’s Penn Station to Oakland, California to find out what America’s rails are up to these days. With a mix of still photographs, video footage and a written story that reads like a personal journal, “Train in Vain” shows, at minimum, the dynamic capabilities of a good ol’ American travel story.

(photo by Amy Stein via GoodMagazine.com)