Vancouver Blogger January 2009 Meetup recap

Our biggest Vancouver Bloggers Meetup yet! This time we were at The End Cafe at 2360 Commercial Drive (close to 7th Ave).

The people

Some of the topics that came up when I was around

  • David Drucker addressed his recent most frequently asked question right off the bat: Even though the Bush era is over, he’s not moving back to the US
  • Twitter, twitter, twitter, twitter, twitter, twitter!
    • John Chow talked about how to get lots of followers and retweets. He has used Twitter for online promotion and sponsored competitions
    • Lots of people were very curious about Twitter, if they should take the plunge, what it was good for, etc. I’m sure they got very different answers depending on who they spoke with
    • Pete Quily was applauded for joining twitter earlier that day
    • What does it mean on Twitter to “block” somebody? That they can’t see what you write? That they can’t follow you (your icon disappears from their page, etc.)? That their tweets won’t show up in your stream even if they @reply you?
  • John Chow gave several free consultations on monetizing your website with ads, sponsorships, affiliate programs, etc.
  • Congratulations to Eric Bucad! Since our last meetup he got the job he was looking for as an accountant with a downtown architect firm
  • Joey deVilla, Accordion Guy - photo by John Chow

    Joey deVilla, aka "Accordion Guy" - photo by John Chow

    Our visiting Internet celebrity Joey deVilla held forth on his accordion. Unfortunately this was right when I was in the middle of an interesting discussion, so I didn’t catch what he was playing. Did I read somewhere that it was a Britney Spears song?

  • Evan Leeson has a cool claim to online fame: He’s one of Flickr’s most Interestingness‘st users. He repeatedly makes the top 100 in Flickr’s daily “most interesting pictures” rankings
  • John Chow showed us his automatically translated (from English to Chinese) blog. He and Sarah said that the translation was acceptable; you get the gist of the articles. He has written about it on his blog: Global Translator – Translates Your Blog Into 34 Languages. It’s all done by the free WordPress Global Translator Plugin. An advantage with this approach is that the translated pages are stored on the blog itself (they don’t just exist as on-request translations in the cache of some online translation service) which means that you suddenly double, triple, quadruple (etc.) the number of pages that Google and the other spiders find at your site… without running into the dreaded “duplicate content” issue.
  • Northern Voice, the local blogging / new media conference was mentioned a few dozen times. The ones who are going look forward to it, the ones who didn’t get a ticket in time are wondering what happened: The speaker list wasn’t even announced, and then it was sold out?
  • Christopher Trottier has an interesting approach to online videos on his new site Staretube.com: He finds unusual videos that haven’t yet gotten a lot of attention and attempts to make them “go viral”.
  • Gord Pollock self-described his blog as “pretentious and rarely updated”. In fact there are only two posts on the blog right now, but those two posts are pretty awesome in my opinion. Thanks for introducing me to the Usenet slang expression “eternal September“, for example.
  • Michael Allison (who I’ll remind you is looking for work) actually got his last job because of his blog: A boss man decided that Michael was just who they were looking for after he read Michael’s blog.
  • The Israel-Palestine conflict and other non-trivial troubles were kinda-sorta sorted out, but not to anybody’s preferred degree of satisfaction
  • Boris had the following financial analysis and advice: The pound sterling is dropping against everything else, England is going to hell in a handbasket and will probably have to adopt the Euro. Sell, sell, sell!

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

And if you think all this sounds like a lot of fun and you want to join us next time we have a Vancouver Blogger Meetup, join our group on Meetup.com.

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One Comment to “Vancouver Blogger January 2009 Meetup recap”

  1. Pete Quily 23 January 2009 at 0:59 #

    Great write up Jan.

    Thanks for being the Vancouver Blogger Meetup’s documentarian/chief connector of bloggers.

    Glad David D is deciding to stay in Canada.

    I think success and popularity of Northern Voice has probably surprised the organizers. Not too many conferences sell out before they list a single speaker.

    Hopefully the organizers might consider a bigger venue to fit some of the people who wanted to attend, and maybe give more people a chance to present at the conference which could make it even more interesting and useful. Seems to be a lot of previous attendees that couldn’t get in because it sold out so quick.

    Had a great time at the meetup, always have a lot of interesting useful conversations. Talked about mental health blogging, internet business models, baby blogging (didn’t know it existed) immigrants learning Canadian culture, and online conversion factors, and SEO among other things.

    Thanks again for your sage advice on using twitter, it’s one of the reason’s I finally started tweeting.

    Reply

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