Meetup.com Report: The Victoria Bloggerati

Meetup.com is a free online service that is used to organize meetings of like-minded people in the same city. This week I attended my first two meetups -- the Victoria Graphic Design meetup on Monday, and the Victoria Blogger meetup today.

The Victoria Bloggerati convened after several months of absence, at two tables at Starbucks on Government. I had the great pleasure of meeting up with Todd (http://www.toddbrill.net/), Jodie (http://tryingreallyhard.com/), Leon (http://firemind2.blogspot.com/), and Wil (http://www.mentalwanderings.com/). I spent most of the evening chatting with Leon, who counts among his many interests his Flickr photoblog and his many blogs ("I've got too many of them!").

Wil's a veteran blogger who's been at it for a couple of years. He recently moved to beautiful Victoria BC from Portland. We talked a bit about TypePad, WordPress, and some of the other blog systems out there.

It was great to meet Jodie, who is the humorous voice behind www.tryingreallyhard.com. She brought her son Aidan (hope you weren't too bored during the meetup!). Jodie has a bunch of creative ideas, and she will soon be launching a new website, which she's quite excited about.

And I was intrigued to see Todd whip out a Handspring Visor PDA (I had a couple of years of good service from a Visor Neo), and it was great to meet a kindred spirit. We're both big fans of Web 2.0, and of course we had to evangelize RSS and Bloglines (the most convenient RSS reader out there BTW). Todd - we've got to chat more about this stuff!