stef's posterous

Birmingham Bloggers Meetup Podcast and Photos

(Pictured - Nick Booth and Jon Bounds) Thursday night saw the first ever Birmingham Bloggers Meetup happen at the Kitchen Garden Cafe in Kings Heath. I made it down for the first hour or so, and it was a small, cosy event in nice surroundings. More photos here. It was nice to see a few new as well as a few familiar ones, including Charlotte Carey, Jon Bounds (BiNS, UpYerBrum), John Mostyn and Nick Booth (Podnosh) who made it happen (sorry - I didn't get everyone's URLs). I gave the early birds a quick demo of a project I'm working on at the moment called the Big Picture which is launching at the end of the month and is very exciting indeed. There'll be lots more about this later. Then, because I had to leave I used my new podcasting device to record a quick discussion. I asked the group: "What does everyone reckon about the article that was published in the Guardian last week saying that there are lots of cities in the UK that have fantastic blogging scenes, and Birmingham wasn't even on the list?" Here's what they thought (audio M4A format - 7.5MB). (Apologies on the mobile phone blips in a couple of places. Also, I've edited out certain parts at the request of a few present, and compressed it because it was very quiet in places). A few of the suggestions:

• Have some regular meetups so we can all meet other bloggers.
• Organise some "learn how to blog" events for people who want to get into blogging but don't know how.
• Don't call it "Birmingham bloggers" - how about "social media"?
• Sort out a tagging rule for anything about Birmingham that we publish - "birminghamuk".
• Start using XFN to link to other Birmingham bloggers?
• Just link to other people a bit more from time to time?
• Do some more stuff with the Birmingham Flickr group?
• Have a chat to Marketing Birmingham about how they can connect with the blogging community?

I'm sure there were more, but I had to leave early. Good stuff though - nice to see a few like-minded people getting their heads together... If you're interested in coming to others that Nick organises, join the Birmingham Bloggers Facebook group. Charlotte Carey also has a writeup.