Tagged in TA: Defining Yourself at the Pulver Networking Breakfast

It's embarrassing that it took me so long to post about attending this networking breakfast in Tel Aviv, but I guess better late than never.

Who am I anyway? Am I my resume? That is a picture, of a person I don't know? It's always hard to define yourself to other people, but at Jeff Pulver's networking breakfasts, they've found a way: name tags with your mantra or motto on them, and additional smaller tags that work the way tagging does on the internet.

At the breakfast, I met a few interesting people, including some whose names I knew but whose faces were new. Of course, there was Jeff himself, plus Israluv, Brian Blum (whose blog I read back before I was a blogger, if you can imagine such an epoch), and of course, Nir Kouris networking at the event with another one of his young CEOs from ecampIsrael.

Want a closer look at the whole tagging situation? Another photo plus additional explanation after the jump.

As you can see, my freckled arm was the bearer of much information about me, including my tagline (which for the purpose of this event was "Urban Kvetch" since it's arguably my strongest brand. (Who knew, when I picked the name on a whim in 2004...).

Then there was "Twitter Newbie"--although I'm totally a Twitter whiz (Twhiz?) to some people in my New York life or blogger life, not in this tech-savvy crowd.

I also tagged myself with several additional topics, like "pop culture," "Jewish life," and "blogs," but I think the idea was that other people were supposed to talk to me, and tag me with the tags they thought I should wear. They didn't, so I self-tagged. Which is fine, because it should help me optimize myself for internet search. Presumably, to translate the online metaphor into the offline realm, let's test this. Go to your window, open it, stick your head out, and yell, "Esther Kustanowitz!!" and see if I pop up outside your building as a search result.

Yes, I officially just became geekier. Mark the moment: 40 days to the Omer, zero hour for the Sex and the City movie, and t-minus 2.5 hours to Shabbat.

Shabbat shalom from Jerusalem, which is definitely not Tel Aviv.