(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.
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7 Comments
Wish I went now. Nice post Stef! The guy in the background look’s like Geoff Pearce, If John was there, theres a good chance it was him, although, not sure he’s into blogs.
Well there’ll be others - keep an eye out on the Facebook group. Yes - that’s Geoff - John and he were both there.
I’m busy developing and testing a ‘Birmingham Planet’ blog, a simple aggregator of other blogs into one. We need to call for a standard, organised set of tags. If the site link doesn’t work do not worry. I have wordpress running on my laptop, so if it’s offline, my machine is either off or away from home.
Stef, nice write up, and lovely photos. Was good to meet you. What was the name of that audio recorder again?
And where can I buy one?!
Interesting piece but to be honest some of the content on these blog sites is utter rubbish. To suggest this news should be featured on Marketing Birmingham would kill any chance of a decent Birmingham ideal to anyone outside the city.
For example: a news piece about Britney Spears speaking in a Brummie accent does not do this city any favours.
@Jon, sure - but if you look at the post I just put up you’ll see that a lot of these blogs actually are getting as much as if not more traffic than the more ‘obvious’ sites in the city.
Hi Stef
Just found this post as I was looking to see if there were any good geeky bloging/twittering/anything else meetups in Birmingham.
I’d be interested to come along to the next one. But will details be posted anywhere else? I’m no fan of Facebook to be honest. I like my life to be accessable by all (thanks to Flickr, my blog and Twitter)
@Simon Howes - I have some server hosting if you want somewhere to host the website. Would be glad to offer that up. Just leave me a comment somewhere on my blog!
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[...] networking that happens at Wolverhampton’s Light House, and apparently there was even the first Birmingham bloggers meet-up recently (although no-one told me about it). Sadly, Birmingham does not have a good track record on [...]