Thursday, November 15, 2007

Cool Toys and No Bloodshed at the Washington Blogger and OLPC News Meetup

Despite images of violence, Wednesday's mashup of the Washington Blogger Meetup and DC OLPC News contingent went off well. The OLPC guys had the advantage, since they obviously had cooler toys:

Ross Karchner plays with the OLPC X0-1
Ross Karchner plays with the OLPC XO1. Leon is behind him.

Ross also posted an entry using an ASUS Eee PC, which is a basically a palmtop -- it's slightly bigger than, say, a graphing calculator.

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Two OLPC X01s laptops, no child.

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DC Metblogs' Wayan and DCist's much-reviled (so he says) Aaron Morrissey.

Wayan also gave me tips on how to be unemployed.


I think the meetup benefited from the cross-pollination. Since the purely social/drunken aspects of the DC blogging events are pretty well-covered by the various happy hours, I'm trying to think of ways to differentiate the midweek meetups, make them more attractive to bloggers and potential bloggers by focusing more on mechanics and making them a bit more utilitarian.

I'm talking about things like making them a more hands-on, how-to, workshoppy, best-practices, bring your laptop, potentially-boring-except-there's-beer kind of thing. Not sure yet.

Maybe I'm taking that "Marketing Department" label too seriously.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for letting me leave without picking a blogfight! I appreciate not getting a beatdown in the name of technology!

I think you're on to something with the utilitarian angle. Still, it shouldn't be 100% dry, because you'll want new people to feel at ease when they attend these things. Bloggers aren't always the most social people on Earth to begin with, so it can't all be SEO and widget talk. I definitely look forward to next month's meetup.

Joelogon said...

You can present. Come up with a topic.