I keep forgetting to announce this, but I set up a Providence Geeks group on CrowdVine, a lightweight social networking site that my friend Tony Stubblebine set up. I don’t really think of it as a social network because everything that happens there is connected with a group and very limited in scope. You don’t spend hours and hours polishing your profile and looking for others to connect with; Facebook and others do that sort of thing just fine.

CrowdVine is totally crowd-centric: you answer a few questions, post a photo, maybe friend a few people in the group, and that’s it. From there, CrowdVine turns into a back-channel for an event or association, and is great for matching names to faces, finding out more about someone, or informal followups before, after, or during geek dinners. Anyhow, the Providence Geeks CrowdVine is up and running, so check it out and join up if you feel like it!

I know a lot of you have been looking forward to this one – Wednesday’s dinner will feature a presentation by the Providence Geeks regulars of Public Display!

Public Display, a Providence-based startup, has embarked on a research-intensive technology project with the mission of collecting various kinds of unstructured information from the Web and organizing it into a structured and useful format. During the presentation, we’ll learn a bit about the field of Information Extraction, witness the first public demonstration of one of their apps, and hear about some lessons learned in their attack of this extraordinarily difficult problem – including some geek-speak about Ruby and Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine.

The folks at Public Display are no strangers to the start-up scene with many team members having started companies of their own in the past. Bill O’Farrell, CEO, has had a number of successes in the software world including SpeechWorks, a speech-recognition software company which went public in 2000.

Please RSVP in the comments section of this post so that we can give the good folks at AS220 an estimated headcount. And while you’re at it, subscribe to Providence Geeks’ RSS feed (see sidebar) and/or join our very-low-volume email announcement list (for the announcement list, send an email to Jack Templin, jtemplin over at Gmail with your name and affiliation).

As always, for first-timers here are the details on the Geek Dinners:

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• It’s totally casual. Wear whatever, bring whoever, arrive and vamoose whenever… And don’t worry about eating or not – come famished or full – eating is optional, and frankly, the least of the festivities (that’s not say the food isn’t good—it’s actually great).
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• Topics of conversation will vary as they will at any gathering of geeks, but many of us will be talking about AJAX, mash-ups, start-ups, new devices, innovative business models, interaction design, social computing, digital art, web services, etc. etc. etc.
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• Food and beverages are for sale at the adjoining Taqueria Pacifica and bar.
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• There is WiFi so bring your connected device of choice.
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Providence Geeks’ own Ed Manlove spoke at the first ever Ignite Boston about what we all can learn from a community of grown-up Lego enthusiasts. Check out the video of his talk.

Providence Geek Jo Lee spoke about her latest project, Ringtones08, at the first ever Ignite Boston. Check out the video of her talk.