Years ago, when I was still working at the Financial Times, I would go drinking with my buddies Dave Galbraith and Om Malik (GigaOm). We would go to Harringtons pub downtown San Francisco, usually on a Thursday evening.

At the time (late 2003/early 2004) Dave and Om were full bore into the blogger scene. You should start blogging was their line. I told them I write six news stories a day, I'm already writing all the time, what would blogging give me?

I was wrong, they were right. When I did leave the Financial Times to become a journalist blogger I had no idea what they were talking about but I soon found out. It became an incredible journey of self discovery, insight into big ideas, and also a spiritual journey. Who would have thought that 'blogging' could do all of that?!

Our Harrington sessions were tremendous idea sessions. I would often stagger back home not due to the beers -- we were fairly restrained (especially compared with London) but due to some of the ideas that would come bursting out later on based on our conversations earlier that evening.

Dave Galbraith is Scottish, an architect by training, he has worked with Nick Denton (a former FT journalist) at Moreover. He also worked with Nick Aster (Triple Pundit), who was at Moreover, and Nick helped build the infrastructure for Nick Denton's Gawker blog network, (and Nick Aster also set up my site SVW.) Dave also worked with Max Levchin, a co-founder of Paypal, on founding Yelp . . . and much more.

Dave runs several great web sites, one of my favorites is Smashing Telly - a hand picked browser-based TV channel. Also Oobject, Cribcandy, Popgloss, Wists, and Yokiddo. You should certainly check out his blog too, Dave is always way ahead in his thinking.

I'm glad he's back in town for a few weeks, maybe I can persuade him and Om to do another Harrington pub session for old times sakes, or rather, for these new times. That would be a killer conversation.