BlogTogether

Following on Greensboro’s lead, I’m organizing a Chapel Hill Blog Teach-in: * Saturday, May 28, 2005 * 12 noon — 2 p.m. * UNC-CH Health Sciences Library Biogen Idec Classroom, a computer lab with 40 seats * For anyone who wants one-on-one help becoming a blogger * For new bloggers who want one-on-one help improving their blog or making the most of their blogware More details on the wiki. We’ll need volunteers willing to mentor new and recent bloggers. Add your name to the wiki.

I once almost drowned while surfing off Honolulu, and as the wave thrashed me underwater, I knew I was cutting it close. Soon, though, I popped up, and gulped a breath of life. I got back on my board, paddled out and waited for my next wave. And so it goes this week, as I’m finally coming up for air amid the heavy surf of work, home and other exhilarating but suffocating activities. All of which is to say, you’d be a breath of fresh air to me if you’d attend the weekly Chapel Hill Bloggers Meetup on Wednesday at 6 p.m. We meet in the Speakeasy in Tyler’s Tap Room in Carrboro. Door prize this week is a new T-shirt from Hawaii, of all places. Conversation starter: Tell us about a blog post of yours in which you shared a fear or a scary moment … or just tell us what you blogged about this week. Also, meetup notice is posted at Meetup.com as well as Upcoming.org. Starting next week, we’ll use Upcoming.org instead of Meetup, as well as the blog and wiki and mailing list. Back on the board …

I’m using Upcoming.org now to organize the Chapel Hill Bloggers Meetup (feed).

Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine posts a useful bit of blogging advice: bq. [I]t’s amazing how many blogs don’t bother to put their names on their home pages and not because they’re trying to remain anonymous but just because they apparently assume that anyone reading already knows who they are. Which echoes something I mention frequently: a blogging best practice is to have an About page telling your readers who you are and why you write your blog.

Have you been listening to WUNC’s North Carolina Voices: Understanding Poverty series? Has that inspired you to blog about poverty or unemployment or Social Security or socialism? Tell us in the comments. See my poverty post.

Justin announces his impending move to California, where he’ll join O’Reilly. We’ll miss you, Justin.

This would be great for liveblogging: bq. Nicholas Kristof Wednesday, April 13, 6 p.m. Doors open at 5:30 for UNC students, 5:50 for general public Carroll 111 As part of 2005 Holocaust Remembrance Week, NC Hillel, CUAB and SUDAN present keynote speaker Nicholas Kristof. The New York Times op-ed columnist will be speaking on “Today’s Genocide: A report from the killing fields of Darfur.” Shall we postpone the Chapel Hill Bloggers Meetup and instead attend Kristof?

Meetup.com announced new charges to meetup organizers — it’ll be $9/month for me to continue to organize the Triangle Bloggers group. Worth it? The site has been a good tool for planning the many meetings (weekly in Chapel Hill, biweekly in Raleigh and occasionally Triangle-wide), but with our existing blog, wiki and the new Blogtogether mailing list, perhaps we don’t need the Meetup.com site after all. Your thoughts, please, in the comments.

The search for the ideal bloggers meetup location continues … This week, we got bumped from the Speakeasy sofa lounge — a group from UNC Hospitals had rented the space — so we went next door to Tyler’s and took up a few tables. Would have been a nice spot but for the stereo speaker directly above us, and that made Karen’s focus group less successful than she would have wanted it, I’m sure. For that, I’m sorry. Anthony Perry briefly joined us, and mentioned he’s working at Blogads with Henry Copeland. Henry’s looking to hire another team member, someone who’s looking for an entry-level position and willing to learn about blogs. Spread the word – get paid to work with blogs. Karen tried to get us to talk about whether bloggers are influential people in their communities and on the web. I talked about Moleskine notebooks and how a blog entry about them led to my purchase of one of the notebooks. That led to a discussion of word-of-mouth marketing. Justin suggested the blogs that are influential are tightly focussed, or niche blogs. Influence, he said, comes from expertise that you get through experience. Tim mentioned his one and only podcast was about buzz agents. A few of us at one end of the table talked about the satellite pictures now available through Google Maps. Attendees: Tim King, Brian Russell, Karen Mishra, ae, Corey Reece, Justin Watt, Sayan Chakraborty, Sri Kalyanaraman, Jackson Fox, Bora Zivkovic and mistersugar. My notes weren’t very good for the meetup this time. Damn noise. I’ll ask Karen for her notes on what she heard from us. Let this be another plea for your suggestions on a good meeting place for 15-20 bloggers to gather for a leisurely but engaging conversation. Wifi would be nice. Refreshments, too.

Lisa Williams, a leader of the Berkman bloggers group in the Boston area, has been tracking the conversations of the North Carolina bloggers. She’s invited us to participate via IRC in the next Berkman meetup, about citizen journalism. See her message to the Blog Together mailing list. If you’re not signed up yet for the mailing list, now would be a good time to register.

National champions. What a game. If you’ve blogged the Tar Heel victory, leave a comment here and link to your post.

Finally, I give you my long overdue notes of the regional bloggers meetup last week, held in my Durham home on a glorious Spring evening. In attendance: Mike Fieschko, Josh Staiger, Tara Sue Clark, Jerry McClough, Jane Peppler, Karen Mishra, TheShu, Derek Lane, Brian Russell, Sayan Chakraborty, David Warlick, ae, Jackson Fox, Roy Kim, Corey Reece, Ross Meyers, Tim King and mistersugar. Tara Sue, Ross, Jerry and TheShu had driven in from Greensboro, and they offered up a lot of their experience and commentary on organizational blogging — a few of them are involved in offering blogs to each of the VFW posts (that’s 9000 blogs across the country, though I’m not sure how many of them are being used) and NAACP chapters — as well as a few questions about the continued role of corporate media and journalists. TheShu, who created Triad Blogs, mentioned he’d be bringing us a Triangle Blogs aggregator. Ross talked about managed blog networks and revenue streams, and said a couple of times that his Choices of Democracy platform was a “Trojan horse” that would lead to revenue streams. (We may need him to clarify just what the heck he means by that, especially in light of his fear that big media is coöpting blogs .) For his part, Derek Lane mentioned he’d once sang with Jane, and when we asked him to explain what shape note singing is, he broke into song … and then Jane joined him for an a cappella duet. Jane told us she blogs for the “delight of the long tail,” saying she sings music nobody is interested in and writes about things few care about. (And, yes, she knows she writes long posts.) Brian plugged PodcasterCon.org, where he’s inviting all to help conceive and plan a conference on podcasting. David told us he’d been interviewed by WB22 about podcasting and was recently in the paper about blogs. Jackson got us talking about husband/wife co-blogging, telling us his wife has begun to contribute more to their every-Oscar-best-picture quest. “I didn’t realize so many musicals had won,” he reported. Tim said Jackson’s austere site design has inspired him to recreate his own design. “Blogging has been a way for me to dabble with the tools,” he said, echoing one of my main reasons for being a blogger. He also mentioned CaRP, a feed parser. Jane mentioned how genealogy became popular with older people, and that led into a discussion about family blogging and ways to get seniors writing their memories and experiences on weblogs. I’ve wanted to get a service project going at a retirement community or senior home – look for details soon (if you’d like to help me plan this, contact me, please). I suggested that a future Tar Heel Tavern could have a theme of asking your elderly family members for stories and memories. Toward the end of the the meeting, I asked everyone what they’d be blogging in the coming week. Most of our past meetups had focused on what people had already blogged – certainly a worthwhile question — and I was curious to know if other bloggers cogitated on themes or topics before writing a post. The answer: yes. Seems bloggers are thoughtful people after all. Thanks to the bloggers who joined us for the regional meetup – next Triangle-wide bloggers meeting will be at the end of April. Until then, find a local meetup near you, submit to the Tar Heel Tavern and sign up for the Blog Together mailing list.

I owe Chewie a big apology — I promised him I’d announce the submissions deadline for this week’s Tar Heel Tavern, but I never got around to posting that (or my notes from the very successful Triangle-wide Bloggers Meetup, see the coming next post). Be sure to check out the Tavern, and get your submissions over to Ron Hudson, host of Tavern #7. (Past Taverns are listed here.)

Finally, we have a BlogTogether mailing list to replace my manual messages to bloggers in North Carolina and beyond. Please register for the BlogTogether mailing list today.