The informal kickoff meetup will be hosted at Big Al’s Bowling in Fishers Landing, where Vancouver chapter head Sean Wiese has planned a “geeky social hour, topical meetings where we can get some insight into new developments in Vancouver, new products, local people, etc.” More deets about the meetup can be found in Sean’s post on the Vancouver Beer and Blog…er…blog. And don’t forget to follow @vanwabeerandblog for updates, too.

Welcome to the fleet, Vancouver!

Beer and Blog has expanded to over 20 cities during the last year and a half. Those chapters have been largely left to their own devices to develop their group. To provide additional support, I am establishing a board of advisers that will be comprised of the chapter hosts from around the world and a few additional roles to be announced later this week.

What this means to chapters

Chapters are still free to remain independent as participation in the board will be optional. Chapters that would like to network with other chapters and take part in the group plans are invited to join us for a monthly online meeting that is to be established. Goals for the board will be established at the first meeting and will cover things like: swapping organizational tips, group efforts to secure swag, planning an international meetup, advice on securing sponsorships, and more.

Get Involved

Our first meeting will be established via an email that I will send to the chapter hosts. At that first meeting, we’ll discuss goals for the board and additional roles beyond the chapter hosts. I’ll publish those additional roles here once we define them. If you would like to be involved, please feel free to drop me a comment!

Congrats to the Cape Ann Chapter for their write up in The Gloucester Daily Times!

The first few meet-ups they had at Cape Ann Brewing were great and they are looking forward to getting more folks involved to collaborate and help each other out over cold adult beverages.

Here’s the article in the Gloucester Daily Times

• Boise, ID with host Wyatt Werner: Twitter
• Salem, OR with host Ross Swartzendruber: LinkedIn
• Honolulu, HI with host Bill Sodeman: Blog Twitter

Please take a moment to say hi and welcome them!

Overall site tour

Tour of the profiles and account management features

A couple of Friday’s ago Turoczy let us know that an Oregonian photographer would be attending. I had no idea at the time that it would lead to big juicy photos on the cover of Oregon’s largest newspaper! Super cool!! Big thanks to Mike Rogoway and Olivia Bucks for covering our event and honoring us with top placement on the cover

Did you find us from The Oregonian?

We’re a friendly group and we’d love to meet you! We’re a group of bloggers and social media types that get together to help each other with our blogs, Twitter, etc. Many people don’t have blogs when they first attend, so don’t worry if you don’t have one either. That’s a big part of the reason for attending!

People start to show up as early as 1 or 2pm. People needing lots of help show up at 3pm when it’s still calm and quite. Many of the 3pm people that need help met someone at a previous Beer and Blog and made an arrangement to show up for the help. We enjoy socializing and network in an informal atmosphere and make it a point to welcome new faces.

Below: Erk, an Australian podcaster, interviews Kelly, a Beer and Blog organizer. Listen to that podcast.

I’m now traveling in California for the next few weeks.

However, we still wanted to have another Tokyo Beer and Blog sometime soon. Andrew Shuttleworth is now *another* co-organizer for Tokyo Beer and Blog, and will be having the next event on April 27. More information about that on the Tokyo Beer and Blog Facebook group or at Twtvite.

-Ken

Last week, Christine and I traveled to Las Vegas and we were able to attend the successful launch of the Las Vegas Chapter. They had an impressive turnout in terms of quality and quantity of people. A couple of the attendees were from the Las Vegas Weekly and they recently published their coverage of the event. Here’s a snippet from their article Suds and buds:

As the Velvet Underground plays in the background, about 30 bloggers mix. One is a woman who blogs about design; two are brothers who mix Vegas news with real estate ads for their business. The one celebrity blogger in attendance is television personality Dave Courvoisier. But he isn’t here for his official TV-related blogging. He started out blogging the traditional way about a year ago, as an extension of his on-air work: “Our station has a blog, and I tried to contribute to that, but my boss kept overriding my blogs, and so I said, ‘Heck with that, I’m starting my own.’” Over time Vegas has become only a shadow in his blog, which has become dedicated to his passion for voice-over acting.

Congrats on a great inaugural meeting Las Vegas!

Thanks to @turoczy @TheSquare and @StephStricklen this weekend’s workshop, End Bloglessness, was featured on Live @7PM. KGW is Portland’s NBC affiliate and has had an increasing connection with the local tech scene. Again, much thanks to them for the coverage and hope that it helps bring more blogless Portlanders to CubeSpace this Saturday!