I suppose to best cover what I thought of the meetup, I’ll split it into “the good” and “the bad”. Though – more fittingly “the bad” should be labeled as “things I’d change for May”.

The good

The meetup is free! It isn’t everyday that you can attend a well organized, professional meetup like this without flying across the country, booking a hotel room, and paying some large entrance fee. Granted the meetup only lasts about two hours by design, but that is actually a good thing.

The meetup is structured in such a way that it is interactive, collaborative, and yet has enough constraints to not become a free-for-all where time could definitely be wasted, and focus lost. I saw many parallels between this meetup and Web2Open (or any *Camp for that matter) in that while someone “has the floor”, the audience can steer the discussion in any direction it’d prefer simply by asking questions.

Photo Credit: Eileen Barroso, Copyright: CU

The venue, Uris Hall at Columbia University on the west side of New York City, is nearly the perfect fit for the size of the audience and the meetup itself. A large projector and a podium for the presenter make it probably the best way to demo and take questions. Obviously, this being a classroom, makes it the perfect design for a meetup like this.

Yaron Samid, of Pando, is the meetup organizer and also moderates the meetup. I think Yaron does a superb job of keeping the discussion moving forward, getting the audience involved in the conversation, and treating everyone from presenter to attendee with respect. He also doesn’t try to promote himself or his company while he is moderating the meetup, something I’ve seen done before and never quite felt right. I’ve been to many meetups, expos, and events this year and Yaron is probably the best meetup organizer/moderator I’ve seen yet.

The bad

Or – what I think could be adjusted over the next few meetups.

Each presenter is given five minutes to demo their product/service to the audience, and then the audience is given five minutes to ask questions of the presenter. I like this balance of time – but I’d much rather see less presenters and more time allotted for demoing and Q & A. I think the meetup would benefit greatly by reducing the number of presenters each month by half, and allowing double the amount of time for demo and questions. How can you possibly demo a rich application with hundreds of features in five minutes? Ten minutes may still not be enough time, but at least it’d be enough time to give the highlights. Several of the demos that were given at this particular meetup, were cut short due to time – and although people can just go look at these sites themselves when they get home – I think that being able to show off the product/service in full would make for much better Q&A afterwards.

The Q&A session afterwards was nice, but I almost like the way that the panels handled it at South by Southwest a little better. People approached a microphone and stood in line waiting their turn. Although this venue doesn’t really adapt itself to that – perhaps raising your hand and leaving it up should be the way you’d be “in line”. Or even standing – instead of people just yelling out questions. I saw one person who left their comments on Meetup.com about the event say that they thought some of the questions got to be a little “snarky”. I agree. Though the attendees aren’t journalists trying to make nice – the hard questions are the ones that people want to ask the most. I’d love to see a little more structure here – but overall it seemed to work well.

And finally, there was supposed to be time for “announcements” by the attendees at the end. Some people were looking to hire, some were looking for jobs, others wanted to announce something. I think that this is a huge problem to solve since it’d be nearly impossible to give everyone in the room the time they need. That, and once the presentations and Q&A are over, many people left rather quickly. Perhaps an announcement could be given at the beginning, that any person/company with an announcement should stay afterwards and would be given 30 seconds. Then they’d at least have the opportunity to say something like – “I’m looking for a good graphic designer, please see me if you’re interested.”. This opportunity was lost this time – and I heard many people expressing that they were upset about that.

Photo Credit: Yaron Samid
Geno from AOL and I

Oh, one more thing that I’m just going to inject into this post – the NY Video 2.0 Meetup needs a photographer to attend. Many events on the west coast get great photo coverage – and I’m sure video coverage won’t be too big of an issue – but I’ve yet to find many photos of the event online so I think that someone should step up to the plate that lives in or near NYC.

Note: If you were at the NY Video 2.0 Meetup in New York and had an announcement – run over to Viddler, create a free account, use our “record with webcam” feature and put your announcement there. Be sure to share it with me or tag it with video2meetup, and I’ll try to get it in from of Yaron so that we can help broadcast those announcements to all the attendees.

Conclusion

If you have the chance to get to one of these meetups, I highly recommend it. I had a great time – I love trying to support east coast events like this, and it was a good opportunity to meet people that work in our industry at some level. I’m looking forward to the next time I have the opportunity to meetup.

If you’d like to watch all of the presentations I was able to record them all on video and put them on Viddler. For a recap in text-form, I recommend reading through CenterNetworks coverage of the event.

[tags]new york city, nyc, video 2.0, meetup, yaron samid, centernetworks, video, viddler, columbia university[/tags]
[slug]nyvideo2meetup-thoughts[/slug]

Rob will be giving a presentation on Viddler and three other presenters will be demoing some of their stuff. I’m looking forward to all of the presentations, but mostly I look forward to making Rob laugh in front of 300+ people! Aren’t I a great friend?

If you are in New York City, or can get there before tomorrow, try to make it to the meetup just to say “hi”. But you’ll need to RSVP pretty quickly, since there are only about 84 “slots” left as of my writing this. You can RSVP via Meetup.com.

Looking forward to Video 2.0 and hopefully seeing you there!

Update: I’ve got Eliza, Mike, and Andrew in my car already. And, “rumor” has it that I’ll have a few more friends coming that you may want to meet – stay tuned…

Another update: Guess who is crashing Video 2.0? Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV. Now you’re getting your calendars out and erasing that business meeting you had tomorrow night, aren’t you?

[tags]video 2.0, meetup, new york city, event, viddler, rob sandie[/tags]
[slug]event-nyvideo2[/slug]

The crew on South Street after the last Meetup

It looks like Tony Green and I will be having a conversation so please be sure to join in as we discuss Microformats (which I’ve used to markup this post by the way).

I was finally able to pull Alex Hillman out of his shell. He was recently interviewed by Philadelphia Weekly about his efforts in CoWorking. You may want to pick his brain about this…

I just hope this snow doesn’t affect our plans. Though I think we’re pretty determined.

Note: You can add this event to your calendar program of choice since this post is marked up using hCalendar. Enjoy.

[tags]meetup, philadelphia, pennsylvania, ten stone, tony green, microformats, coworking, alex hillman, events, hcalendar[/tags]
[slug]meetup-031707[/slug]

When we first arrived Jen Simmons, Owen Winkler, and Kel (Joseph Kelter) were already there talking about various topics dealing with WordPress.

At this point I kind of flew off the handle at my disgust in the current WordPress world and with Habari (which I didn’t know Owen was one of the developers). However, after Owen literally gave me his laptop, in cool tablet form, to use Habari – and I can definitely say that the project is showing signs of potential. With Owen at the helm, I think the project definitely has a chance. Perhaps someday I will write up my thoughts on both of these topics.

Rob Sandie and Tom Kim

At this point people started to trickle in until the entire room was filled with people, conversations, and card games. I ended up mingling with Josh, Mike, and Jason for the majority of the time (which wasn’t long enough) and didn’t get to speak with many people that I really wanted to be able to.

Next month I’m going to try to get back down to the meetup (though I think I’m going to Philly at least two other times during the month of March so I have to check on a few things), and hopefully I’ll be able to speak to those I missed this time (Tom and Tony I’m looking at you two).

To any of you that attended that I did not get to meet or talk to – please make it a point to say hi to me next month.

[tags]weblogger, meetup, philadelphia, pennsylvania, ten stone, mike stickel, matt regula, jason santa maria, joshua lane, jen simmons, owen winkler, chris fehnel, eliza devroe, wordpress, habari, tony g, tom kim[/tags]
[slug]meetup0207-recap[/slug]

Chris at Ten Stone Bar – April 15, 2006

So far Eliza, Mike, and Chris are coming with me. It looks like Rob, Tom, and Marisa are definitely going. Andrea and Jason might be going. And sadly Tony G. can’t make it. Update: Happily Tony G. is able to make it!

And, it appears we’re going to have a fairly full house.

If you are in the Philadelphia area (heck I’m 2 1/2 hours away and I’m still going) and you’d like to meetup with some great people to discuss WordPress, blogging, Viddler, or just sit back and enjoy a beer – sign up to the meetup and we’ll see you there.

Note: You can add this event to your calendar program of choice since this post is marked up using hCalendar. Enjoy.

Note addendum: It appears that the above link won’t work for Outlook users? Not sure why – probably because Outlook sucks?

[tags]philadelphia, meetup, webloggers, blogging, wordpress, event, pennsylvania, viddler, rob sandie, chris fehnel, mike stickel, colin devroe, eliza devroe, tom kim, marisa mcclellan, andrea, jason santa maria, tony green, microformats, hcalendar[/tags]
[slug]meetup-021706[/slug]

First, we met up with Andrea and Tom. This happened to be Tom’s first Meetup also. It would seem that Meetups are an old hat to Andrea, since she is involved not only with the WordPress and Weblogger Meetups, but because she also frequents the Philly Webstandards Meetups as well.

Mike, a freelance developer and Nintendo DS player, was the next to arrive. Mike’s hill-top view, like Andrea’s, into “the standards movement” was refreshing. Hopefully they, and their entire team, will keep up the good work they are doing on that front. Mike is a Ruby on Rails convert, so he is also involved with that group in the Philly area.

Ellen, who brought Pineapple stuffing (which I found delicious) and lover of cats, showed up next. Ellen’s perspective into the attidude, demeanor, and personality of cats really made me think twice about our cats. Ellen described her blogging purposes as “fooling around”, which is why I think many bloggers do their writing. In some ways, it is definitely the purpose for most of my posts here on my site. I find my personal blog a very personal outlet for ideas and thoughts that wouldn’t, and perhaps shouldn’t, otherwise have any public view.

Scott McNulty, system administrator and fellow Macintosh enthusiast came with his smile on. He did not hold me accountable for my Drew Carrey comment, to which I will forever be in his debt. By far, the funniest guy in the group, Scott even made Ellen’s Pineapple Stuffing recipe hilarious.

Ben, fitting name for a bloke in Philly, came in fresh from the Philly Pillow Fight (his photos from the fight). Ben has a firm hold on what he likes musically, so he and Chris had a nice discussion regarding that. Here are some photos that Ben took while at the Meetup.

Amardeep, also known as Deep (the best name on the planet bar none), wandered in from the nearly 75 degree Philadelphia air. All of us wished that we had more time to talk to Deep, though the amount of people and the amount of time that we had together didn’t add up. Deep teaches Literature, and so his site is driven towards his thoughts on that specific topic.

Marisa of Apartment 2024, showed up beaming. I doubt she’ll ever live down the fact that her site comes up first for “Does Papaya make you poop?” on most search engines. We all have our vices Marisa. She also writes for the Philly Metro blog, which has the purpose of advocating local blogging. It will be decades until we see a Clifford Metro blog, this much I can assure you.

Tony, whose specific job title eludes me right now, works for TV Guide in Phildelphia. I didn’t realize they were based there, but you learn something new everyday. Again, another gentlemen that I wish I had more time to talk to, he writes his personal blog for the very same reason we all do, as a place to jot down thoughts. Recently Tony wrote an article called Bon mot du jour, in which he states that he isn’t always as eloquent as he’d like to be. I can fully attest to that, being that I’m often caught saying something that sounds like someone ten years my junior.

Stephanie, of Patrick Murphy 06, walked in next. I didn’t get any time to speak with her, but she’s on the front lines of blogging about politics in the Philadelphia area. Seems like their doing a fairly good job too.

Leah (spelling, sorry) and Duran came in last. Slackers. After talking to Duran for a little while I learned about his hatred for Active Directory, or those that manage it improperly to be sure. I’m with ya Duran. Leah, another person I only literally got to say “Hi” to, was very excited to get some help with her backyard. Go help her out if you can. Oh, and she thinks that Hilary could use a bra. I can’t say I agree.

Final thoughts Springer style

All in all the trip was definitely worth getting to my first Meetup. I had fully expected to see Owen, who ended up having a medical situation, and I hope he recovers quickly from that. Jason Santa Maria, Rob Weychert, and Joshua Lane of Pixelworthy were supposed to show up too. I hope their teeth are ok.

It was enjoyable, if only for a few hours, to spend some time with people that hold the same importance on this thing called blogging that I personally do. I look forward to doing it again one day, and I’m even considering starting up a Meetup closer to home.

[tags]philadelphia, meetup, weblogger, wordpress[/tags]

This Saturday, at around 2pm EST, Eliza, Chris and I are heading down to Philadelphia for the April Philadelphia WordPress Meetup, organized by Owen Winkler.

Shortly thereafter, since it would appear that the WordPress meetup will only last about an hour, we’ll attend the April Philadelphia Webloggers meetup.

Having never been to a meetup, I can’t say as I have any expectations as to what will happen. I’m simply going as a trial to see what all the hoopla is about.

If you will be in the Philadelphia area, and can attend either meetup (which happen to be at the exact same venue), then please stop in and say hello.

[tags]philadelphia, meetup, wordpress, weblogger[/tags]