When you host an event at a specific place for several months and you decide to move it, you should give people ample notice. But, somehow it got to be Friday and I’m just now posting about tonight’s Beer and Blog. We’re going to try a new venue out because we’ve out grown the Green Dragon. They have been good to us, but people can’t hear and if any more showed up, we couldn’t accommodate them. So, let’s try Plan B (formerly Acme).
This is the 2nd of 3 waves of Vidoop employees coming through town and they will be sponsoring tonight’s session. Michael Richardson (@mtrichardson) will be sharing a special announcement from Vidoop that was originally described to me as:
“Vidoop will be launching and seeking feedback on a new product that enhances usability of OpenID”
I was able to get a little more info from them last night and I think their announcement will spark much discussion about the next generation of the social web on which we all blog currently. You won’t want to miss out on this opportunity to geek out on this fascinating topic. Especially when the first round is on Vidoop. 
RSVP on Upcoming
This meet up marks the first of 3 Beer and Blogs that will be sponsored by Vidoop. They are sponsoring these sessions because they have a grip of Vidoop employees coming to Portland over the next few weeks and would like to show them a good time. How rad is that?
It is only fitting then that we’ll have two Vidoopers, Scott Kveton (@kveton) and Michael Richardson (@mtrichardson), leading the first of these sessions in a talk about DiSo. If you’re not familiar with DiSo, that’s ok because that is what this talk will be about. It is a distributed social project that seeks to replicate the functionality of social networks in an open, distributed manner.
Here are a couple of links to get you going:
For your reference, Chris Messina (@factoryjoe) went to work for Vidoop in order to work on his DiSo project full time. So, we should be getting some rad information for the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Not that Scott or Michael have horse mouthes. I’m going to stop typing now.
RSVP on Upcoming
Last week, I was chatting with @grigs saying that I was interested in him hosting a session on mobile blogging. Jason let me know that he was hot on another topic at the moment and wondered if I would let him speak on it. Not being one to pigeon hole a man for his most visible passion, I said let’s do it! Here’s a brief description from Jason Grigsby on what this week’s session will be:
There are many reasons to optimize your blog and make it load as fast as possible. You’ll use less bandwidth, save money, and make your readers happier.
But there is yet another reason to make sure you site loads as fast as possible. It is one of the easiest things you can do to reduce the energy your site uses. Unfortunately, most web sites don’t do the basic things that would make them run faster and use fewer resources.
So this week at Beer and Blog we’ll shave seconds off an example blog using simple techniques and do our little part to make our blogs greener.
I’m totally interested in how to speed up my blog, especially since I know now that it helps the environment too! Come join us to learn some ninja tricks. Also, we’ll be making a cool announcement about a sponsor that is going to pay for the first round of the next 3 Beer and Blogs after this one.
Rad shit is happening.
Ok, if you’ll be there, RSVP on Upcoming por favor.
Just like the good ‘ol days of Beer and Blog, tonight we’re going to have a work session. I know I’ve been wanting to launch my new blog for some time now, so I plan to be working on it. If you have some updates, plugins, or design work that you’d like some help with, bring it down to the Green Dragon! If you’d like to let peopl know you’re coming, then RSVP on Upcoming.
Since summer has decided to show up before spring, we’re going to celebrate the glowing orb in the sky by having a BBQ in the park. @brampitoyo and his Saturday creative group are joining us at Alberta Park today. I’ll bring a grill and some charcoal, you bring something to put on it. I’ll also have some ketchup, mustard, and mayo as well as paper plates and cups. In case we are all feeling it, I’ll have a Wiffle ball and bat as well as a Frisbee at the ready for some good ‘ol fashion brand-name plastic fun in the sun.
The party starts at 12pm, and I plan to be there until 3pm. If you’ll be there and want to let your light shine, you can RSVP on Upcoming.
Most of us probably check on our traffic stats for our blogs. But, how many of us actually know how to drill down on our stats to find the valuable information that could direct our blogging activities? This session is going to explore techniques for mining your traffic stats on Google Analytics, MyBlogLog, Feedburner, and maybe some more. Learn how to discover new relationship opportunities, find out what has caused bumps in your traffic, what you should post more about, and more. We’ll also talk about patterns in traffic and how you can maximize the output of your pattern.
We’ll be at the Green Dragon from 4-6pm, and as always, you can RSVP on Upcoming.
This Friday will be the awesomely fun Portland BarCamp. Most of the Beer and Bloggers will be attending this event, which starts at 6pm. So, rather than try to sprint to BarCamp from the Green Dragon, we’re going to roll up some sleeves and help the Legion of Tech crew get set up. We’re meeting up at CubeSpace at 4pm to do stuff like set up chairs, rearrange the kitchen space, and the like.
Our field trip to SyKart was a blast! @samgrover captured several pics of the Beer and Blog Racers laying down some rubber. We had a great time and plan to have another field trip in a few weeks. We talked about going to Glowing Greens, Ground Kontrol, and Grand Central Bowl as some next options. If you have any requests, drop them in the comments below.
As a wild side story, originally we were going to take our field trip to Pat’s Acres, but we couldn’t because they were closed to the public due to a race they were hosting. Well, during that race a racer’s kart caught air flipping end over end! Miraculously the driver was unharmed and lived to tell his theory about why. The whole incident was caught on tape and can be seen on the KPTV website.
You may or may not know, but this Sunday is field trip day!!!! Instead of our traditional meet up, we’re going to take it to the track and see who is the fastest blogger of them all. Sure to be a good time had by all, this trip will be a good bonding activity. We’ll practice falling backwards into each others arms as a trust builder. Well, maybe we’ll just stick to the karting.
We’re going to hit up SyKart on Sunday at 1pm. If you haven’t seen my review of the place, you can read about karting in Portland on the Portland is Awesome blog.
The SyKart lowdown is:
- Driving Requirements - Drivers must have a valid license or take the driving school. Must buy a SyKart license, which is $5. Must have a helmet liner ($2 to buy one).
- Price - $15/driver/session. Sessions are 10 mins.
- Location - 8205 SW Hunziker St., Tigard, OR 97223
- Hours - 11am–11pm Mon–Fri, 11:30am–11pm Sat, 11:30am–10pm Sun
- Contact - 503-684-5060
Looking forward to whipping your asses seeing you all there! Please RSVP on Upcoming if you’re going to be there. 
Does Twitter really offer any special service? Have we been duped into using their clogged tubes for no good reason? This is the question we plan to explore tomorrow as we attempt to replicate Twitter’s functionality with our blogs and some free online services. More than a few people are working on a decentralized Twitter, but I suspect that we are trying to hard to crack microblogging as a service when it may just be a category on our blogs. Come join us on the first ever Beer and Blog work session that has a focus: Can we replace Twitter with our blogs?
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