Yet another location for the meetup, though Tyler’s Tap Room (really, the attached Speakeasy’s back lounge) seems to be a winner – there’s free wifi from tocwireless, good beer on tap (I had a pint of Duck-rabbit milk stout), comfortable sofas and a pull-down screen that’s a perfect showcase for Bernard’s new projector. We’ll be there next week again at 6 p.m. In attendance: Jane Peppler, Bernard Glassman, Cecilia, wife of Tim King (who briefly joined us via Skype), Roy Kim, Brian Russell, Jackson Fox, Rob Zelt, Karen Mishra, Michael O’Connell, Kevin Nesnow and mistersugar. ae couldn’t join us so she sent her greetings: bq. “Hello to the CH Bloggers group from the End of the World, literally. I’m sending this note from the town of El Calafate in Patagonia. This is a beautiful, wondrous place, and I haven’t even made it out to the glacier yet! The ride from the airport was gorgeous enough for one day. Think the wide expanse of the northern California desert + jade green lake + the Andes. Lordy.” Roy finally got a chance to take center stage and give us a tour of his tabulas.com service and community, which many of us suspected of being pretty cool. It didn’t take long for us to see just how talented Roy is, and understand the enormity of his accomplishment. Turned out yesterday was the second birthday of his project, his first software programmng effort. Since then, Roy’s built a tool similar to LiveJournal, initially a way for his friends and him to journal their lives, but now a global community dominated by teenagers and Filipinos. See his community stats (and compare to LiveJournal stats). Those facts led to discussion about cultural and gender adoption of technology. See Roy’s post, in which he picks up on our discussion of Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point and the linchpins of the tabulas community. Roy mentioned his recent trip to South Korea, where each person has a national identity number and an automatic web page (will have to check into the details of this). “But nothing is posted of substance,” said Roy, suggesting the cultural value of privacy keeps people mum about their personal details. Michael asked Roy how he’d been so successful in building his community. “Easy access to me” and guaranteed responses to e-mail messages, he answered. He’s also responded to user suggestions for new tools by quickly implementing them. Such tools include cross-posting (to Blogger and Xanga blogs), WYSIWYG formatting buttons, a style editor, FOAF, image galleries and file uploads, sticky posts, avatars and nested comments, birthday reminders and more. Tabulas is mostly a closed community – friends linking to each other, and new users of the site are almost always referred by other users – and that leads to inherent trust, said Roy, which then gives him the freedom to prototype new features. Roy built tabulas on the LAMP framework. He’s got RSS 2.0, which pleased Brian, since 2.0 has enclosures, the key ingredient for podcasting. (Brian found a few opportunities to inject podcasting into the conversation, and as always was entertaining and enlightening. Look for a demo of podcasting, by Brian natch, at one of our next meetings. And for our first Triangle-wide bloggers meeting, probably a demo of blogads by Henry Copeland.) What did I miss? Post your recollections in the comments. All in all, a great session last night. Thanks to the soft-spoken and humble Roy for the tour. Brian said it best: “You’re a talented [mofo].”