Vancouver Blogger November 2008 Meetup recap

Another month, another Vancouver Bloggers Meetup, this time at the very transparent and very triangular location Gene Cafe at the corner of Kingsway and Main. The cast:

• Raul Pacheco aka HummingBird604 the organizer of our meetup (twitter)
• Matthew Collinge, the 604 Homes Guy (twitter)
• Will Wertheim, aka Agent Will (twitter)
• Karen Hamilton from Tinybites.ca and KarenHamilton.ca (twitter)
• John Biehler from JohnBiehler.com (twitter)
• Thomas Strumpski from TheStrump.com (twitter)
• Lorraine aka Raincoaster (twitter)
• Frederick Cummings, a painter and video artist who works with Fearless City (see below) (twitter)
• Eric Bucad from Rickie Rambles Randomly (twitter).
• Me from A Great Dane in Vancouver (twitter)
• David Drucker from LoudMurmurs.com and Drucker.ca (twitter)
• Airdrie Miller from Lipgloss And Laptops (twitter)
• Shane Gibson the sales trainer from Closing Bigger and Knowledge Brokers International (twitter)
• Alex who was looking for blogging advice to pass on to his wife who is a personal trainer

Some of the topics that came up when I was around:

• I congratulated David on “his” new president in the USA. He thanked me and wondered where I’d heard that bit of political news. 🙂
• The eternal topic of how to make money from blogging came up. Here’s my standard answer which I also gave tonight:
  • In order to make money directly from your blog you have to build a big audience (that takes hard word and some luck) and then monetize the audience (show them ads, get affiliate or referral income, etc.).
  • But even without massive visitor numbers, you can make money because of your blog: Use your blog to promote your business or services, earn credibility and authority as a professional in your local area in your line of work.
• We discussed our different takes on our own blogs, different values and threshold for what to post, etc. Some people write on a schedule, others write when something important enough comes up.
• Eric is looking for work. If you know of an open position for trained CGA accountant, please contact Eric.
• Karen spent an hour eating a yummy-looking cookie right in front of me… Tiny bites, indeed.
• I promoted the idea of listening to the various WordPress podcasts for anyone who want to keep up to date on releases, plugins, vulnerabilities, etc. the easy way. Subscribe to them all (hey, it’s free!), listen to a couple of episodes of each podcast, then unsubscribe from the ones that don’t take your fancy. Here are three different ones that have very different styles
  • WordPress Weekly (almost resurrected from the dead) with Jeffro2pt0
  • The WordPress podcast (almost renamed to please Automattic’s lawyers) with Charles Stricklin
  • WordCast – two young guys Dave Moyer and Kym Huynh and Beth Skinner, the realtor lady they know from church
• A couple of people have become freelance agents recently, others have found gainful employment in the local tech industry. You know who you are, congratulations to you all!
• The website for Northern Voice 2009 is up (February 20-21, 2009 at UBC), and there’s a call for speakers. Apparently one of the organizers complained on Twitter that very few people showed up to an organizing meeting. Meanwhile very few people knew beforehand that the meeting would take place. The two might be related.
• Raul mentioned he’s proposing a session at Northern Voice about fighting the stereotype of bloggers as being teenagers living in their parents’ basements. David suggested running a survey about why we blog. I mentioned that Darren Barefoot did exactly that at Northern Voice two years ago (Darren’s blog post about the survey, and if the 2007 section of NorthernVoice.ca wasn’t down right now, I’d put a link to the session here).
• Mostly David and Karen talked about food and restaurants and bars and wine tastings and coffee tastings and food grocers who deliver boxes of meal ingredients and recipes and PR events for liqueurs and then some more restaurants.
• Lorraine talked about Fearless City, the downtown eastside initiative to teach local residents social media skills. Folks from the project are going to cover WordCamp Whistler in January. Lorraine mentioned that this would be the first live covered WordCamp, but I think it’s been done before. WordCamp Portland 2008 claimed as much with a ustream video feed “live from Dave’s chair”. WordCamp Dallas 2008 also did live streaming and their videos have been edited and are still online. Here’s an example presentation (WordPress FAQ) by Aaron Brazell (Technosailor).

If you were there tonight, please leave a comment with some of the topics you discussed last night. Also, if some of the information above (names, blog URLs) is incorrect, please let me now.