September Cleveland Weblogger Meetup

Attend­ing this meet­up at Metro Joe’s:

Jim East­man
Martha Lat­tie
Craig Lyn­dall who had free CDs for his band, The Com­pa­ny Line.
Bob Rhubart
Rick Bohan
Ger­ar­do Orlan­do
Tim Rus­so
Bill Calla­han
Will Kessel
Bill Bar­row
Ken Dun­can
Lori Kozey
Daniel­la Lindquist
Jer­ry Ritcey
George Nemeth
Jeff Hess
Adam Har­vey
Tim Fer­ris and Glo­ria Fer­ris
Mary­Beth Matthews
Pho’s Nor­ka Pages
Jaclyn Sta­cy
Matt Mar­tinez
Scott Gear­i­ty
Jack Ric­chi­u­to waltzed in after an hour and a half. Hmph.

9 attend­ing con­sid­ered them­selves polit­i­cal blog­gers.

We dis­cussed peo­ple who get irate about com­ments left on blogs and then threat­en lit­i­ga­tion. We deter­mined that there is already legal prece­dent pro­tect­ing blog­gers from third par­ty com­ment­ing and libel. We dis­cussed the dif­fi­cul­ties of nav­i­gat­ing the FEMA web­site in help­ing NOLA refugees, how to dri­ve traf­fic to your web­site, main­ly through com­ment­ing on oth­er peo­ple’s blogs. The intri­ca­cies of Track­backs, RSS, and Word­Press plu­g­ins, includ­ing one which will help defend against AdSense pirates. Tim thinks Google Alerts is bet­ter than RSS. There was also the ubiq­ui­tous copy­right dis­cus­sion. Jaclyn, who is still work­ing on fight­ing Wal-Mart in Cleve­land, brought to our atten­tion their High­er Expec­ta­tions Week. Will brought up Mint as a source of site traf­fic log­ging and Jeff men­tioned AWstats.

Scott Gear­i­ty had the quote of the night:

The blo­gos­phere is dom­i­nat­ed by this sort of lib­er­tar­i­an con­ser­v­a­tive cabal.

Around 9 the group adjourned to Ful­ton Bar and Grille for tasty bev­er­ages. I rode my bike home.