London Bloggers new venue, competition and pubs July 29, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : london bloggers, London , 2commentsI’m looking forward to the London Bloggers meetup tonight at a new venue near Blackfriars Bridge. Organiser Andy Bargery says there will be “plenty of space and cracking views over the Thames” which sounds good.
With it being a larger venue, I noticed on the meetup site that there are still two places left at the time of writing, which would be unusual this close to the event normally. So the London bloggers group is slowly developing into an enjoyably friendly and interesting regular event, with occasional sponsorship, some presentations and now even a competion with a great prize. It’s a trip on an Airship no less., something I’ve always fancied but unfortunately the deadline has passed - doh!
Actually one of the reasons I missed the date was because entry to the London Bloggers competition was by writing about your local pub and why it’s so good. Where I happen to live, all the local pubs are pretty dire right now so it’s hard to find inspiration on that particular topic. Local pubs are an important community resource in smaller towns, village and city centres as well but in London they tend to be more like retail outlets which happen to sell some drinks or else shabby old buildings with few customers where the manager is just keeping things ticking over. So we tend to have to get on a bus or train to visit a pub which we’d want to be in and that actually sells something we want to drink, and if you’ve taken transport to go out of your own borough then that hardly counts as local does it.
Even if I’d decided to write about say the George at Wanstead, which was lovely and cool inside on the hottest day of the year and sells Westons Old Rosie and Organic Vintage ciders on draught, I’d have had to mention the funny group of old men who hang around on weekday afternoons, the Friday night meat market, the gauntlet of smokers crowding the entrance and the highly strained relations between bar and kitchen staff which ought to put you off eating anything that comes out of there.
London Bloggers presentations June 26, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : london bloggers , 5commentsLondon 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
London Bloggers Blogroll February 23, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : london bloggers , add a commenton the face
sizemore
flamelikeme
danielbower.com
Kid666 Blog
>Re: PHOTO
Gullible’s Travels
My London Diary - Photographs by Peter Marshall
Andy Roberts - Distributed Action Research with communities of practice and social objects
sandrineplasseraud.com
Lead Generation in the UK
cheezy cheeky*
Ed Eliot
London one-way!
Sound Of Silence
The Marketing Blagger
Thoroughly Good Blog - Vox
London Review of Breakfasts
Apriti Sesamo
The Social Times
worshipstirregulars
littledollface
one million mees
The lost outpost
Pocket Vintages - wine guide, wine recommendations, wine reviews: Pocket Vintages - All About Wine…
LEWISHAM SUCKS
Tiki Chris*
Dorward Online
Londonist:
davblog
Blog Till you Drop!
Shiny Media
RobHinchcliffe.co.uk
Lewisham Kate*
Girly Geekdom Blog
welovelocal Blog
welovelocal.com %u2013 The smarter way to find local businesses
The Plummet Onions
rashbre central*
ill theatre
The LSE Observer
Girl with The Golden Mind
thebeef
mountain dweller
My Chemical Toilet
elektrischau
Openads Blog
France to go
Ange1swords
ShinyRed
Aref-Adib
Streets of Forest Hill, SE23
Mr Brightside’s
trevorginn
ryanajarrett.com
London Bloggers January 28, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : london bloggers, blogs and community, London , 1 comment so farAndy Bargery, who I met at a London Geek dinner last year, has set up a new home for London Bloggers, which is a blog of course, and a meetup tomorrow evening near Waterloo. I’ll be there. If you haven’t registered already, it’s too late but why not subscribe to the blog and come to the next one in February.
Welcome to the Home of London Bloggers
If you live in London and write a blog then you might be interested to come along to the regular London Bloggers Meetup. The next event is on Tuesday 29th January at the Camel & Artichoke Pub near to Waterloo, check out the Meetup page for more info.If you can’t make it, check back here in early Feb for a round-up of the event and quite possibly a handful of photos. Then of course you can register for the next event in Feb.
If you are a London Blogger you might also want to add yourself to the London Bloggers Wiki page
Frankie Roberto - Citizen journalist January 22, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : london bloggers, social media, wildlife, internet, Flickr, London , comments closed“All in all, a good few days for citizen journalism, if not so great for the whale.”
So concludes a lengthy blog from Frankie Roberto who has taken a big interest in citizen journalism and wikinews recently. No doubt he has his reasons for doing so.
frankie roberto blog - Citizen journalists report on the London whale
photo by Mr Jaded
Tags: London, blogging, citizen, journalism, media, news, websites, whale
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
