One of the themes I've been repeating in Chapel Hill and Greensboro is the usefulness of a weekly open bloggers meeting, like the one we started at Berkman Center. Once a week, weather permitting, the conference room is opened to anyone who shows up and a discussion follows about whatever is in the air among bloggers, mostly in the Boston area, but certainly not limited to Boston.

When I was there, we organized trips to New Hampshire to see Presidential candidates campaign for the primary, we planned two BloggerCons, and helped newbies get started blogging. A fair amount of software was developed by members of the group, which continues to meet.

This face-to-face "pulse" of a blogging community is very important, in the same way that a BloggerCon is important. Yesterday each of us got a chance to visualize what the North Carolina blogging world looks like.

Now, after much pleading and cajoling by me, at brunch today, Anton Zuiker, who was the driving force behind Saturday's conference, said that they're going to start meeting on Wednesdays at 6PM, at a location to be determined. I have no doubt, based on the good vibe here, that it will come off, and it will be very happy development for Chapel Hill and the surrounding area.

I've suggested that they contact the Berkman Thursday group, and that one or more of them make the trek up to Cambridge for a Thursday night meeting. I can't imagine that the folks there would be anything less than ecstatic to find out there's a new group to compare notes with and to learn from.

Another obvious resource to tap into is Bob Stepno, a former Berkman Thursday regular, who is now at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Bob is a great guy and get this, he knows the people here. He says his haircut was insprired by Paul Jones. I'll try to dig up some pictures so you can see what I mean.

I also asked Anton to take notes as their meetings get established. We didn't do much of that in the early days of Berkman blog meetups, if we did, I would have suggested he study them. Maybe Jessica has some? It's all kind of foggy to me.

Resources:

1. Berkman-Thursday mail list.

2. The weblog for the group.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 2/13/05; 5:36:14 PM - --