Beer and Blog

First, let me start by saying thank you to everyone that showed up to our first Blog and Beer. I think we had a very successful start, especially considering we didn’t announce this thing!

Our first meet up started with good conversation as people trickled in. I’m going to take on capturing notes from the meeting and will post them on this site before the next meeting. As we add presentations, we’ll attach assets like the slides or video. Here are a few things we talked about at the first meeting:

Comparing microblogging services

Mostly what we talked about here was how Twitter and Jaiku compare. Michael Richardson gave some analysis that Jaiku is more of a true microblogging service because people can leave comments on an entry. We all agreed that Twitter is more of a group IM with solid mobile compatibility. One advantage that Twitter has is a much larger user base. Jaiku also offers channels and lifestreaming.

BlogAds.com

Another nugget from Michael was a service that is popular in the political blog space known as BlogAds.com. This ad distribution service is not a CPC or PPC model, rather you dictate the ad contract arangement for your site and BlogAds handles the payment and campaign management. Seems pretty cool for folks unhappy with Kontera or AdSense .

Media mix

One thing I brought up was the idea of a media mix for your blog. The idea is that if you are looking to hit a particular volume of traffic, you’ll need to think about what sources you require to actually make those numbers. It brought into question whether or not it was even possible to hit high volume numbers for topics that may not appear to be niche on the surface. Out of that conversation Michael dropped yet another jewel that I’m not going to share. Just thought I’d make you regret not coming.

Meaningful vs. Popular traffic

Our media mix conversation lead us to discuss meaningful vs. popular traffic. Essentially, if you want to high volumes of traffic, you’ll have to discuss topics that are of interest to the populace at a level accessible to everyone. While that doesn’t necessarily exclude meaningful traffic, it certainly restricts the possibilities. I brought up that I wrote a post about coming to grips with what brings in high traffic. There were some great points made about why people blog and separating personal blogging from entrepreneurial blogging.

Next meet up

I think we’re going to need a lil bit of structure at our future meetings to coordinate that various folks. We can start with next week. We’ll start with an hour of free form help, which means people can ask anyone in the group for help on anything they are working on. I think it makes most sense to have that be the first hour or so because that’s when people are trickling from getting off of work. Then, starting at 5:30pm, we’ll have a presentation. It might be something like Scott Kveton explaining how to integrate Open ID with your blog commenting form (hint hint, nudge nudge). After that people can stick around as long as they like for Q&A with the presenter and/or get some more help from folks in the group.

Also, if you show up to the meeting, you can tag the Beer and Blog wall, which means you’ll make it onto our blogroll. It’s that easy.