Last night I attended the bi-monthly Raleigh Blogger Meetup in the WiFi rich Cafe Cyclo, a combination coffeeshop and Vietnamese restaurant. Cool!
I’ve attended a number of these. It’s a personal challenge. All of the other attendees are deep inside the technology industry. They’re mostly programmers, working for Sun Microsystems, IBM, BB&T, and one who says, “I can’t tell you. I’d have to kill you” .
It is a huge challenge for me, because the language (mostly acronyms) and the incredible clip of speech that many people under the age of 30 can attain when their excited, make it very difficult for me to follow. If find that I can understand what they are saying for about fifteen seconds, and then I lose it. My mind just isn’t as sticky as it use to be.
But one notion that I walked away with last night was the sense that the Internet is becoming the computer. I know that Web 2.0 is often described as the web becoming the platform, but much of the programming that these young guys were talking about treats the entire world wide web as a single machine, whose content is there for the tweaking. Mashups are a perfect example, but this is much more serious. I wish I understood it better, but I suspect I’m past understanding these things that well any more.
They are kind to me, and pat me on the back when I show them my meager tools.
Buzz words, buzz words, buzz words,
You need to come to the Chapel Hill meetup tomorrow night. Completely different themes – much more about social, personal, political and, yes, educaitonal aspects of blogging. We try to keep the technical geekery to the minimum.
I see and value of both ends of the blogging community. It’s what impressed me so much about the bloggercons I’ve attended, that the content focused side of the endeavor, melded so well with the technical geekery side of it. It was unique and refreshing.
I have been planning to attend a Chapel Hill meetup, but I’m in transit to Florida today for a blogging and podcasting workshops with Sarasota teachers, and won’t be able to make the meeting. Perhaps the next one on the 22nd.
You are always welcome, whenever you can make it.
I wish I’d noticed this post earlier.
The Raleigh meetup was never intended to be a “hardcore” techie meetup, but it seems that’s what it’s becoming. Nerds attract more nerds I guess.
I’ve been woried for a while that we can be intimidating to non-techies, as evidenced by the fact that only the nerds seem to be sticking around. This isn’t intentional. It’s just that many of us don’t have many chances to interact face-to-face with like-minded people and when we do it’s easy to get excited and carried away.
I wanted to let you know that we’re always glad to have you, and if you ever need us to slow down and explain we’re happy to do so. And I’d hardly call your tools meager 🙂 I, personally, have been pretty impressed with the very practical problems you’ve been able to solve.
It’d be nice if we could get a greater number of non-nerds attending the meetup, but chicken-and-egg, I’m not really sure how to do that at this point. If you have any ideas I’d be happy to hear them.