London Bloggers Meetup

May 27, 2009 on 12:52 pm | In Uncategorized | No Comments

Last night was the first time I’d been to this particular meetup. There’s a lot of different ones going on. In fact, sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have someone on the team networking full time. Given the number of events in London, such a job could be a busy one!

However, I particularly enjoyed the Bloggers meetup. The venue Shish was intimate but not crowded or overly noisy (which is the one thing that gets on my wick at some events), and that facilitated decent discussion with some really interesting folk.

The main presentation of the evening was from Floyd Smith (I’d link here but no URL on his card), and it was about turning a blog into a book. This would have left quite a few bloggers with a feel-good factor as he made the point, and quite rightly so, that even if your blog has a small following but your content and ideas are good, then you already have the basis to grow that into something much larger.

As with anything ‘real’, it always boils down to people connecting as people (not just software and numbers), and if you have some active and vibrant connections then good on you! The next post I write will be about my experience with twitter which will flesh out this point if I get it right.

Floyd also made the point that the technology of today empowers you to blog and then self publish on the path to maybe securing a distribution deal further down the road. He pretty much knows his onions having published 14 books before (including a web publishing guide in the well known ‘For Dummies’ collection).

The focus for his next book is climate change and after a bit of discussion I managed to learn from him that glacier measurement is a good way to assess the effects of global warming. This was enlightening as I’m a complete cynic when it comes to reading statistics and forming an opinion. Who knows who’s trying to manipulate data so they can keep their funding etc., so I’m certainly going to do some research into glaciers and how they’re behaving.

One question from the floor caught my attention and could have sparked off a whole other discussion, and that was from Metro journalist Tom Phillips. He asked Floyd to what extent he thought content should be freely given away, and I immediately thought of Ben Young’s (CMO of My Drag’nDrop) latest venture which is a book entitled ‘The Best Ideas Are Free‘. I haven’t read this but I’m guessing that it’ll be along the lines of what Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine had to say in this great interview with Charlie Rose.

Thanks to Andy Bargery for organising this event – it’s well worth putting high on the list of monthly ‘must-do’s’, and cheers Rax for giving me the heads up about it.