Last night found me at the regular London Bloggers Meetup, organised as usual by the very capable Andy Bargery of marketingblagger.com
This time we were in a basement wine bar near Aldgate tube thats part of a small chain, the Corney and Barrow – rather a swish venue and a cut above what we’ve been used to for the blogger meets – mind you I’m used to places where you can buy beer on draft and have the choice of more than one lager, but that’s posh winebars for you *cough*
The rather funky Melanie Seasons from Fake Plastic Noodles gave a short talk on her experiences of coming to London from the US, including lots of amusing anecdotes and some heckling from the misbehaving American ex-pats in the audience 
Being in PR, Melanie came across as being very confident and self-assured, but reading her blog this morning it appears that she was really nervous about speaking – given how friendly and non-judgemental we are at the bloggers’ meets she really had no need to be worried 
Once again I had a really enjoyable evening, and just in closing as a treat I have a couple of quick web tips that I picked up last night. If you have your own blog there’s a site that tries to guess your gender by looking at its contents – genderanaylzer.com. From my posts it assumes that I’m male but says that the contents are quite gender neutral – fair enough. Worryingly however, according to them Annie Mole from the London Underground blog is more of a bloke than I am, so I’d take the results with a pinch of salt!
There’s also a site that will check the status of web sites for you from various different locations around the world to confirm whether problems you are experiencing accessing a particular site are confined to your connection or are more widespread. It’s at Down for everyone or just me? A site with a single page and a single purpose, and all the better for it – I’ve already used it twice today.
And I should also mention that I met Paulina from the Ligress blog, ‘a whirlwind of news, geek-speak, tech, art and more’. She’s not a prolific blogger, but there are some well thought out pieces on her page. Worth a look too!
(btw I mercilessly nicked the photo of Melanie from her Flickr stream – I hope that’s OK – I’ll remove if not)
About Pete Stean
