Hidden upstairs in West End pub (like an Victorian anarchist’s meeting in a Joseph Conrad story) is the monthly London Bloggers Meetup. The pub had an old world feel to it and still advertises Double Diamond beers (at least that’s what the in-pub signage said). Up the tight winding stairs and into a friendly room equipped with a plasma screen I felt like I had been transported back from the 1950s into the 21st century. I finally got to meet organiser and marketing expert Andy Bargery in person, we had talked previously online.
There was more familiar attendees including Annie Mole, Rob Hinchcliffe and Spinvox‘ James Whatley. All of us had managed to parley blog writing into some from of professional benefit. With Annie having managed to get a book publishing deal to channel her passion for the London Underground system.
New people I met included Improbulus who shared her emperical experience in developing a search engine-friendly blog with the rest of the group:
- Think about key words and make sure that they are in the post title and first paragraph of the posting
- Configure your domain so that your posting title is in the domain
- Include similes of words thoughout the copy (include language variation spellings like US and European English variants)
- Tags
- Outbound links to high-authority sites
Improbulus also is a die-hard Psion 5 user, but I may have tempted her to shop around for a Nokia E90. Other people included Pete and Julius who blogs about event management.
There were presentations at the London Bloggers event from:
- Commentag which provide a service that helps sort and browse comments on a blog.
- Wordcamp UK a WordPress user and developer conference to be held in Birmingham this year.
- M3: is a location aware social network for mobile devices. The focus on where 2.0 and mobile devices changes the context of the service rather like the Flickr ZoneTag mashup and Dodgeball that was a spinout from New York University. Both look to take advantage of the GPS modules appearing in modern smartphones
London Bloggers are running these events on a regular basis, managed through Meetup.com.