The premise of last night's technology event Ignite Seattle was simple. Get into groups and spend a half an hour building bridges out of popsicle sticks, stand on them until they break, and then listen to a bunch of super short presentations. It worked. We learned so much about happenings in and around the Seattle tech world we feel like we leveled up like twenty times. Really, we had high expectations --enough so that we became a sponsor-- and those expectations were consistently exceeded: We thought it would be well-attended and it was packed. We thought the geeks would build a few popsicle-stick bridges that could withstand the weight of a team member and almost all of them did (although not the bridge that we helped with - sorry guys). Most importantly, we thought the presentations would be short enough to not get boring and they were universally exciting and full of ideas and we didn't want a single one of them to end so quickly.

There were a lot of fun people in attendance, including actual females as well as the technology-meets-art set, both of which do a good job of upping the energy of a technology event. The speaking schedule was frenetic (5 minutes, 20 slides, no interaction) and prevented anyone from hijacking the night for their own nefarious purposes (recruitment, marketing, networking, etc; not that those things are bad, but they're more not bad in tiny chunks), but we had plenty of time to track people down between sessions to follow up. Two fantastic MCs (/organizers/fascilitators/everythingelse), Bre Pettis and Brady Forrest, brought out the geeks and kept things jumpy and fun, but CHAC provided three other key ingrediants: alcohol, electricity and the dark. Today, even Seattlest Donte seems impressed and he hates everything. More of these events, please.

So what was in the giant power pill of information we ate last night? Too much to go into, but check out the list of speakers. Go there, close your eyes and click a link - You will be taken someplace interesting. We particularly liked hearing about Scott Berkun's new book, Reality All Starz, McLeod's Residence, Asterisk, and, well, it seems boring if you're not a tech person, but Amazon Web Services are really really cool.

Because these events attract an AV Club on Crack type of attendee it will be digitally documented all over the web, but the IgniteSeattle.com site is a good place to start looking and Flickr won't disappoint.

Images from Chris Metcalf and Bre Pettis.