The online status economy made physical meetings with software creators newly significant.

Evidence

The year 2005 was also the first for two largely ad-hoc gatherings, SuperHappyDevHouse and BarCamp, which attracted social media enthusiasts primarily working at venture-backed startups. Scott Beale, who began blogging on New Year’s Day 2005, relates one of the first meetings between himself, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, open source activist Chris Messina, and blogger Om Malik. Beale was using WordPress software and learned from Mullenweg’s Flickr stream that Mullenweg had just relocated to the Bay Area and was hosting a meetup. Beale was eager to meet the man behind the software: “This is so hard to conceive of now but I’m like, ‘Wow! I could actually meet the guy who made the script that I use for my blog.’” At the meetup, Beale suggested to Mullenweg that he throw a public party for WordPress. The party successfully brought together many other technologists. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 156

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s earlier chapters on how status display online drives offline interactions; also to scholarship on micro-celebrity encounters with fans.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 156