Verbloggers in the Flesh

A late report on the weekend’s Vermont blogger meetup at Langdon Street Café in Montpelier. It was pretty cool – twenty people there or so and I think everyone had a good time. This was only my second blogger meet-up, and it was a lot more pleasant than the first.

I started blogging back in 2003, in New York City, and went to a blogger meetup organized by the folks behind the excellent NYC Bloggers site, which has spawned ripoffs in nearly every city where they have a subway map and some where they don’t. The main things I remember about that event, held at some anonymous bar in Hell’s Kitchen, was that everyone wrote their url instead of their name on the ‘Hello, My Name Is …’ stickers they gave us to wear, and nobody drank much. Most of the people there were a little tense and distracted because they were trying desparately to ingratiate themselves with Meg Hourihan and Jason Kottke (the Posh n’ Becks of the blogosphere.) It was kind of uncomfortable, and more than a little boring.

But the blogger meetup in Vermont was just as I’d expected: a laid-back gathering of people who were friendly and a little quirky, but who definitely had a sense of humor about their own geekiness. Some nice chats were had. The Vermont blogging community seems to really be getting off the ground, and for this big props must go to Cathy Resmer and Seven Days for spreading the good word. It’s especially impressive for a newspaper to be leading the charge, since most newspapers either see blogs as unwelcome competition or don’t really understand what a blog is.