Last month I was fortunate enough to host the inaugural Sydney weblogger meetup, where I got to meet Sisi, Petra, Ian and John. I missed out on meeting Sara and Emma, who were at the same pub but didn’t find the rest of us. Therein lies the problem of meetups:
- it’s difficult locating others in the same meetup group in lieu of a visual cue (my fault entirely as the organiser);
- venue/meetup time may be inconvenient
- (I don’t know about you but) face-to-face is hard work
In a meetup group still in its infancy (though 30-strong), we had 20 RSVPs but only seven actual attendees that we know of (though I caught up with the very affable Steven Noble, who sent his apologies beforehand, for a pleasant coffee that morning).
It got me thinking that perhaps we could complement the face-to-face meetups with a virtual one, i.e. via a chatroom-style approach hosted by AustralianBlogs where users can do the meet-and-greet but also break out into user-created rooms for some private chit chat (where appropriate).
Let’s set an informal virtual meetup on AustralianBlogs Chat on the second Wednesday of every month starting on the 10th of January 2007. From 8pm AEDST till late. Users can come and go as they please.
Feel free to pop in anytime to roadtest the chatroom, you’ll probably find me in there still testing it out and ironing out bugs.
See you all 10th of Jan 2007@8pm and every second Wed of the month thereafter (all Australian bloggers welcome regardless of state/territory, incidentally…) Love to hear any feedback.
Next time I’ll get there! Great to have coffee nonetheless…
Great idea! See (read) you then…
Thanks guys. Look forward to catching up with you then.
I’ll actually be in Sydney on the 10th so I might just have to drop in! 🙂
C-dub,
You practically keep Sydney hours anyway, so you’re halfway there already.
JY
is meetups still going? I’m in Melbourne
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