Last night was the first London Bloggers Meetup of 2010, at the classy Jewel bar in Maiden Lane, tucked away behind the Strand.
Andy Bargery, our organiser, achieved a bit of a coup last night, obtaining sponsorship from Vodafone for the event. Now being a bit of a cynic I’m not keen on attending social events organised by a big corporate, because they tend to be a bit full on with the hype, but I have to say the evening was very enjoyable, probably because of Dan. Dan is Vodafone’s social media PR guy, who was unfailingly pleasant and personable throughout the evening and always happy to give a straight answer to a straight question, which in my experience makes for a very pleasant change! Vodafone were very generous too, paying for the bar all evening and offering a prize draw with a top prize of a free iPhone 3GS, won by Judith from the MostlyAboutChocolate blog (I’m with you there Judith!).
Dan also introduced James Holland to the assembled crowd, who recently covered CES in Las Vegas for Vodafone. He is the editor of electricpig.co.uk, a technology news site, and he came along last night to excite us all about the idea of live blogging – that is, posting opinion pieces and pictures to the web as an event is actually happening.
Now I can see that live-blogging has its uses, but for a blog like mine it doesn’t really work as an idea 99% of the time – I’m pretty sure people would object to me live-blogging a gig or cinema visit, and on my trips out at the weekend it would be just deathly dull to do it – and try uploading 10mb raw photo images using a mobile solution when you’re sitting on a cold bench in the park….
Anyway, he did point us to quite a few useful resources (which you can find here) if you do want to try it out for yourself, and I’ll certainly look at them so that I can have a go if I’m at a suitable event or happening later in the year – thinking about it, perhaps the zombie event last autumn would have fit the bill. I do have the capability to post pictures up to the web and blog directly from my HTC Magic Android phone as it happens, so I might subject you all to an experiment at a later date…
All in all, I think last night was the best meetup I’ve been to so far – I met a whole bunch of interesting people (including a couple of non-bloggers who were there for the free beer!), and long may they continue