On the third Raleigh/Cary Bloggers Meetup

by Josh Staiger

March 16, 2005

The latest Raleigh/Cary Bloggers meetup took place tonight.

In contrast to the sparse attendance last week, we were able to draw a fairly nice crowd this week, with some new faces in attendance. Participants in addition to myself included:

Interestingly, both Vincent and Martin happen to be IBM Extreme Blue interns, although this was my first real correspondence with either of them.

Given that everyone who attended this week had a technical background, the discussion immediately took on somewhat of a technical flair. My memory can't possibly do justice to all the topics we covered, but here is my best shot:

We discussed Mark Pilgrim's Butler script for the Greasemonkey Firefox framework. We agreed that Greasemonkey opens up the door to some very interesting hacks, especially in conjunction with XMLHTTPRequest (aka Ajax) - the technology that drives Google maps.
Martin pointed out a in interesting bookmarklet that animates a Google maps route, as demonstrated by John Udell
Vincent would like to see a method of allowing readers to rate blog entries, and remarked that he would like a way of exposing only the highly rated posts to new users, when it might otherwise get burried in a flurry of blogging randomness.
It was discussed that someone is trying to patent a method of only exposing higher quality entries to new subscribers of an RSS feed, as an introduction, while regular readers will receive all content.
We discussed tags on flickr and technorati. This lead to a discussion on Metacrap, and the limits of metadata.
D remarked that del.icio.us is a lifesaver.
We discussed various ideas for automatically highlighting interesting content across the blogosphere, including Steve Gilmore's attention.xml, even though none of us really had any clue on what attention.xml actually is or how it is supposed to work.
We talked about Gmail, and using algorithms to scan the content of an email and automatically group related content without having to resort to manual labeling (avoiding metacrap pitfalls)
We were quite pleased with Google's offering of free POP access to Gmail (along with smtp), but wondered how they could possibly have no future plans to charge for it.
Podcasting was discussed, and it turns out that I'm not the only one who has stopped listening to Adam Curry because I'm sick of hearing podcasts about podcasts.

Marty wondered about how the concentration of bloggers in the Triangle compares to the rest of the country, and remarked that it would be interesting to see a map illustrating the density of bloggers by region.
Dave mentioned that GeoURL had recently come back online, and could possibly serve as the geographic map that we envisioned
YouSendIt.com was mentioned - a service that seemlessly allows one to temporarily host large files too big for email (up to 1GB) in order to "send" them to another user.
Comment spam was discussed, including the usual suspects of nofollow, captcha, and methods of defeating captcha.
Dave wondered how clickthrough pricing is determined for systems such as Google AdWords. It is actually a marketplace system where advertisers bid for keywords. Although Google doesn't do so, Overture allows you to view advertisers' max bids for specified search terms.
The Super Shuffle, a blatant Taiwanese rip-off of the iPod Shuffle was also discussed.

Please feel free to leave a comment if I left out anything important or got anything wrong.

We came to a consensus that bi-weekly would be a good frequency to meet. Given this, I propose that we meet on the first and third tuesdays of the month.

Hopefully this will keep my readers from lynching me for having to hear about a Raleigh meetup every other entry...

Time to sleep...

UPDATE 2:

Alternate perspectives on the meetup:

UPDATE 3:

The next Raleigh/Cary meetup will be Tuesday, April 5, 2005.

Details:

When: Tues, April 5 2005 @ 6:30 p.m.
Where: Cafe Cyclo, in Cameron Village

2020 Cameron St
Raleigh, NC 27605 (map)
(919) 829-3773

Informally RSVP at the Raleigh/Cary Bloggers meetup.com page.

We will meet on the first and third tuesdays of the month, at the same time thereafter.