London Bloggers presentations June 26, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : london bloggers , trackbackLondon Bloggers
This month’s London Bloggers evening meetup organised by Andy Bargery returned to the Coach and Horses with a slightly more formal evening than the usual social event, having four presentations for us to consider.
Comment Tag
Presented by Xavier Damman. After a good roundup of general strategies for encouraging comment on blogs, the Wordpress plugin CommentTag was presented. It’s for when you get loads of comments on one post (like the 178 comments on this Jodie Prenger in Oliver post) and the plugin generates a tag cloud which aids filtering and navigation of the comments. This could also be useful if the trend for video comments takes off.
The audience grappled with this concept, at first imagining all sorts of artificial intelligence for auto generating the tags but in fact the tags have to be typed in by the commenters and are then stored and retrieved at runtime from a third party database. Unless you are running one of the big media blogs it’s unlikely you would bother with it and I couldn’t help wondering if this comment tagging idea is a solution that’s looking for a problem. But let’s see.
Optimising Blogspot
A mysterious person (possibly Improbulus) who blogs anonymously shared some self discovered tips for optimising blogs for search engines as well as for human readers, based on experience in an undisclosed topic using google’s blogger software. It was refreshing to hear linking out encouraged, but the idea of deliberately mixing up UK and US spellings with synonyms was pretty weird.
WordCamp UK
Tony Scott gave us the low down on the first WordCamp UK which is a semi-unconference for the whole range of WordPress users from novice bloggers to PHP developers taking place on 19-20th July 2008 in Birmingham. Tony claimed that the conference is being organised using “open source methods” to which I would ask “where is the source?” 
M3
M3 is a small startup company trying to launch a product which at first hearing sounded similar to buzzspotr, but instead of doing a mashup of twitter and google maps it’s a walled garden proprietary system. On the plus side, they say the site is designed for mobile devices right from the start.
Beers
I was too late for the Free Alcohol but enjoyed a glass or two of Old Rosie with Tony, Tim and Epicurienne .
Next month’s London Bloggers Summer Social is on Tuesday July 29th
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
“Where is the source?” - haven’t a clue!
Hey Andy,
lovely to see you too! I like this post a lot. It’s really clear with the logos and info. Helped me understand a few things I missed, like M3.
I agree that the synonym/ spelling/ singular or plural form etc tag approach seems pretty redundant.
See you for some more Rosie next time?
Tickets for WordCamp UK 2008 are now available.
Hi Andy
Was good to see you again. Thanks for the link. I haven’t got round to doing mine yet, but had forgotten a couple of the presenters names. You’ve reminded me well, with this post. Cheers.
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