We met up at Open Eye Cafe Thursday, first gathering on the couches and then moving to the back room. (Open Eye is a good location, with parking and free wifi, but it’s loud.) In attendance: Bora Zivkovic, Steve Cory, Calvin Powers, Rob Zelt, Rob Gluck, Christina Whittle, Lorrie Cramer, Roy Kim and Anton Zuiker. Bora brought his children, David and Ruthie, each with a question or two for the group. David’s question about Flash programming met with some shrugs and grunts, since he was clearly more advanced in that department than the rest of us. This was the first Chapel Hill meetup for Calvin, who usually meets with the Raleigh group. He told us about his radio show website, Taprootradio.com, and mentioned he’s trying to understand how he can use Feedburner to broaden his audience. Rob Z, sporting a Samsung mini tablet computer, told us about his vacation to Germany, where he’d write his blog posts and prepare his pictures for upload to Flickr offline in order to minimize his Internet connection fees. Rob G updated us on the search for the ivory-billed woodpecker, saying that there’s a team headed to Cuba next year to search for the elusive bird. Roy talked about working solo, finding time to work on Tabulas, where improvements to the admin tool are forthcoming. Chrissy is having a baby! Woohoo. She’s also interested in the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference, and she told us about the recent Community Genetics Forum she attended. Chrissy also got us chatting about ways to separate your personal from your professional, whether in the same blog or in separate blogs. Steve jubilantly reported he now lives in Pittsboro, and he rattled off all his web efforts, including one about preventing teen alcohol use and another about the psychiatry professor Dr. Eric Schopler (Steve’s a Wikipedian, having added to Schopler’s biography). Lorrie again begged for help in setting up a website, so while the meetup progressed, a few of us granted her wish (thanks especially to Roy and Rob Z.) and by the end of the night — and a round of beers at the Speakeasy — Microblogology.com was up and running. Lorrie’s got some good ideas on how she’ll use her blog to engage her students in discussions about current news of viruses, bacteria and other microbes. And I followed up with news about the science blogging conference. (I’ve since posted an entry about an idea for another big blogging event, this one about food blogging.) Next meetup is Monday, October 16th at 7 p.m. at the Chapel Hill Library. If you’ve got ideas for the agenda that night, please add in a comment now.