So, as you know, four years ago, a lawyer named Patrick Cooper ran for mayor of Birmingham, Ala. Fascinated by the man taking my No. 1 Google rank, I followed the race in city blogs and reported on it here.
One of my sources at the time was The Terminal – a terrific alt-media site. The Terminal's editor, André Natta, saw my linking to his site and was amused. He promptly blogged about "The other Patrick Cooper."
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When André posted, I was at the Online News Association conference in Toronto. The post made my day, and I commented. We continued to watch each other's Cooper coverage throughout the campaign. I liked the site so much I bought its "Nice to have you in Birmingham" shirt.
Lawyer Cooper eventually lost, which helped me get back my Google rank… until two years later, when Cooper ran again. I began following Birmingham's news scene again, and André weighed in, offering sage advice on which outcome would help me the most. After a tight race, Cooper lost again. A Bhamwiki page on him held Google's No. 1 spot.
Two years on, last week, I was again at the Online News Association conference, this time in Boston. The night of the conference's official start, the group I was with stopped at Meadhall bar, where Nieman Journalism Lab was hosting a happy hour upstairs. We had time and taxi issues, and we barely made it before it ended. But we found our colleagues quickly. They were chatting with people we didn't know.
As I glanced at all of the name tags, who was there but André Natta. Exactly four years after our initial linking, we'd ended up at the same conference, same bar. "Hey," I said, "I'm the other Patrick Cooper."

This digital-news world was one small, crazy, awesome world.
We got to hang out at different points on the trip and had a good time. He gave a cool talk about truly engaging with audiences during the "If I Were in Change" session, and I agreed totally. Whether from D.C. or Birmingham, you never knew when you might run into your audience.