Dave Johnson has created a Triangle blogs aggregator page. There’s also the NCBlogs statewide aggegator. Any others? Do we need a wiki page for the various aggregator offerings. That page could also give us a place to discuss the merits of many aggegator efforts.

Any and all who want to talk about blogging are invited to join us for the weekly Chapel Hill Bloggers Meetup this Wednesday at 6 p.m. at Caffe Driade. On the agenda this week is Bora’s Tar Heel Tavern (a la Carnival of the Vanities – see next post) and regional and statewide blog aggregation (see previous post), as well as anything on your mind. More details of the meetup here. FYI, the Chapel Hill Bloggers Meetup will gather this Wednesday and next at 6 p.m. at Caffe Driade. Starting Wednesday, March 9, we’ll have a new location (and possibly a later start time) with wifi and other amenities. I still need suggestions: please post to the comments. With the new meeting location, we’ll begin the pre-meeting Become a Blogger session. Thirty minutes before the regular meetup, I (and other volunteers) will be in place to help any newbies create their own blogs. Also in the next two weeks, I hope we can get an inaugural Raleigh/Cary Bloggers Meetup planned. Want to organize and lead this? Have a suggestion for a meeting place? Please post to the comments.

Bora has created a unique North Carolina edition of Sid’s Carnival of the Vanities called the Tar Heel Tavern. It starts up this weekend, so get your posts over to Bora by 5pm EST Saturday, February 26th.

Good group of bloggers this evening for our first Chapel Hill bloggers meetup. We found each other easily, and smoothly commandeered a corner of the covered patio at Caffe Driade. Attendees: Jane Peppler, Bernard Glassman, ae, Ruby Sinreich, Michael O’Connell, Tim King, Corey Reece, Justin Watt, Rob Zelt, Dave Johnson, Steve Smith, Tony Patterson and Anton Zuiker. Introductions and conversation lasted an hour, covering comments, ways to notify commenters when further comments are added, how comments threads become conversations; e-mail to post and RSS-to-email options; best ways to spread a news item among bloggers (if it’s about blogging, start here); and ways to locate local bloggers and how bloggers can label and identify their blogs by location. Ruby was bubbling with excitement to tell the group about the latest release of WordPress. WP1.5 is out now. Thanks to all who attended, and to those of you who contacted me to indicate your interest and regrets. See you next week.

Jane Peppler writes about being a mentor and flags the March deadline for Chapel Hill volunteers. I wonder if blogging can be a tool for mentoring, like the idea to bring blogs to senior citizens as a way to share their stories and memories. What are other ways to bring blogs to new cohorts?

Idea: The City of Greensboro, or the News & Record, could sponsor a city-wide project wherein each resident is encouraged to create and write a blog in the month of July. (Chicago had such city-wide projects — table tennis in the alleys, painted statues of a bull around town — I remember reading in Gladwell’s classic Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg.)

Brian Russell suggests in a comment to the post below that a possible solution to the meetup predicament (i.e. large region, hard to find place where everyone would be able to meet regularly) is to hold weekly local meetups – Chapel Hill, Durham, Cary and Raleigh – and a monthly regional meetup. Add to that the idea of 3 rotating state bloggercons (Piedmont-Triangle-Charlotte) and we could have a good framework for supporting the local, regional and state blogging communities. Your thoughts?

Tomorrow being the third Wednesday of the month, the Greensboro bloggers meetup commences at 7 p.m. Details here.

I’m still struggling to find the ideal location for the Chapel Hill bloggers meetup, as well as to figure out how to facilitate similar meetups in Durham, Cary and Raleigh. “Start slow, start small,” my ni-Vanuatu counterpart during my Peace Corps service told me. So, our first Chapel Hill bloggers meetup will be this Wednesday, Feb. 16 at 6 p.m. at Caffe Driade. Join me then and there and help me brainstorm better locations (Caffee Driade is ideal except it has no wifi). Details of the meetup are on the wiki page. Makes sense to plan a meetup in Durham and one in Cary/Raleigh. Anyone in those cities care to lead the effort? Perhaps we could alternate weeks: first and third Wednesdays in Chapel Hill, second in Durham and fourth in Raleigh, or some variation thereof.

Quite a few of the bloggers who attended the Triangle Bloggers Conference indicated their interest in a regular bloggers meetup in the Triangle. At the Scripting News brunch, Dave and Ruby both urged me to work on this. The result is an updated Blog Together wiki and this companion weblog, which is meant to be a conduit of information about future North Carolina bloggercons, the regular meetups throughout the state and any ad-hoc get-togethers.