Matt Browne

The Great Twitter Debate: Is Twitter Ready for the Mainstream?

@jbruin and @mattsurfs discuss if the learning curve for twitter is too high? Is the mainstream ready for twitter as is, or do they need to make major changes to reach critical mass.

This session was inspired by Jenn’s post about the Real World Relevancy of Twitter.

I posted a quick video of the event, but you need to friend me on Viddler for access.

BarcampSD III was definitely the best Barcamp yet. All the ‘un-organizers’ did a great job putting the show together. The people were down to earth, the sessions looked valuable, and the games and contests were a riot. Truth be told, I didn’t actually make it to a session yesterday, but I plan to make up for that today.

However, I did participate in the Wii bowling tournament and kicked ass! I figured that if wore my Wii shirt, I had to represent! My efforts earned me a copy of Grand Theft Auto 4 which I gladly donated back to the group. (I love GTA, but I don’t have an Xbox to play it on.)

Dan did a great job organizing DefCamp II. DefCamp was a series of challenges that involved engineering (or hacking) your way through a gauntlet of geeky puzzles and riddles. Once you figured out the secret anagram, you then got a crypt that you had to open without destroying. I am interested to see who won.

I will be at Barcamp from 10am - 1pm, Saturday May 4th. I am doing a talk with @jbruin on “The Great Twitter Debate: Is Twitter Ready for the Masses” at 11am in the main room. I plan on posting a recording of the session if anyone is interested.

It was great to see the tech community leaders get together and strong a great event. To all the local companies that sponsored and made the effort to participate in Barcamp (especially Microsoft), you are rawking San Diego, thank you!

I didn’t think I’d ever admit this, but Microsoft is really winning me over lately with their involvement in the community. Between Lunch 2.0, BarcampSD, and some of the more positive things I’ve read about Microsoft lately, I’d say they are more than putting forth the effort that reflects the legion that they are.

Where is my Apple at? This Microsoft praise just doesn’t feel right.

The SDBloggers met last night to discuss their blogging experiences. We had all types of bloggers represented from larger corporate blogs like MindTouch and Hitachi to personal bloggers such as Jenn Van Grove and Chris Rodgers.

San Diego Bloggers meet once a month to network, share experiences, hopefully learn something, challenge each other, support our articles and initiatives, discuss local events, and above all else have fun.

Is your company interested in sponsoring a future event, please visit: http://sdbloggers.1landing.com/ and let your interest be known.

We just wrapped another ‘Blogger Meetup’ for San Diego which was a great success. Thanks to all of the local bloggers that came out tonight, especially those tolerating traffic laden drives ranging from Vista to Carlsbad just to join us. I appreciate your participation in this event!

The format of this evening’s event was centered around networking. Each member had an opportunity to introduce their blog to the group and explain the focus of their posts. We each took a minute (about 30 total) to introduce our blogs, market new blogs, or promote specific articles.

Jenn, our assistant organizer, posted a list of local bloggers in attendance. In addition, I’d like to dedicate a series of posts picking up where this event left off, interviewing local bloggers. I am going to commit to doing 3 posts (or Utterz) per week showcasing San Diego bloggers and what they are up to. Connect with me on Twitter, if you’d like to talk.

The meeting got off to a late start because David’s Coffee Shop doubled booked the meeting room til 7:30pm, so we had to deal. As it worked out, many local bloggers showed up about that time anyway. Hence, I am going to move the meeting time to 7:30pm for future events.

We are looking for a new location for the next meeting, so please comment if you have any ideas. It is important our new venue can support a presentation for 30-40 people, while still being a friendly, semi-private environment that inspires conversation.

It has been great to see the group mature over the last 6 months. I think we are on our way to building a powerful community that will be an asset to all of us. If you have been thinking about checking our group out for the first time, please join us on April 29th for our next meeting.

‘Blog & Article Marketing’ is the topic for next month’s meeting, followed by a discussion from the group. We are looking for sponsors for future events, please email me if you are interested.

Don’t forget to check out SDBloggers.com to stay up to date with the San Diego blogging community. For our members, please tag your assets and articles with “sdbloggers” & “startupsd.“

First and foremost thanks to Andrew Warner, dt, and Modus Bar. Andrew brought the crowd and the culture, Modus provided kick ass refreshments and ambiance, and dt helped us organize and promote the event.

We were pleased with the overall feedback we’ve gotten. We are also happy to have facilitated a strong networking event for all that participated.

As Chuck from dt advocates, “these events aren’t just about networking, they are about connecting,” going beyond the simple exchange of a business card- by doing so, we hope that we provided a environment that allowed us all to connect with our web neighbors.

By hosting this event we were doing our part to help bring together the social web community in San Diego.

A few honorable mentions from last night- thank you to @viss for your great photography during the event. We were pleased to be interviewed by TechZulu.com, the video is coming soon. Another thanks to InsideTheRabbitHole.com for their post event summary.

For our next event, check us out at SDBloggers.com for our monthly local blogger meetup. Be sure to check out the Facebook group for a great source of local events.

And if you’d like to have an event of your own at Modus, please contact Modus Bar.