Tweetup Recap

I have too many things I want to blog about today (an unusual concern at times and probably a good problem to have), so I'm just going to start with the first thing on my mind.

I attended the first ever Des Moines Tweetup last night.  There were about 6 of us there.  I had previously met only one: blogging evangelist Mike Sansone (@mikesansone).  Also in attendance were: Nathan T. Wright (@nathantwright), the organizer of the Tweetup; Andy Brudtkuhl (@abrudtkuhl) (I'll need to learn how to pronounce that one) who's a fellow developer and tech blogger; Mike Templeton (@miketempleton), a marketing specialist at The Members Group trying to infuse new media into the company; and Scott Phillips (@scottatdrake), who I didn't get to talk to much, but I expect I'll see him around.

Pretty much everyone who attended is a blogger of some form.  I learned much more about the Iowa blogger community than I knew previously.  Through some of their blogs and other people we discussed last night, I discovered the I-List, a list of Iowa-based bloggers being maintained by Focal Point.

We discussed how we each use Twitter and very few of us actually use text messaging, which is usually the one part about Twitter that people know about.  Some use the twitter web page, but have to refresh it every so often because it doesn't auto-refresh (something we complained about).  Others have messages routed to IM clients.  Some use twitter-specific applications like twitterrific (on the mac) or tweetr on the PC.  I'll probably install and start using tweetr pretty soon.  I currently miss out on a bunch because I only have a notifications sent to my phone via text for a handful of people I follow.  I of course have unlimited text messaging on my mobile plan.

One cool thing that happened (for me) is that several of the attendees had read that post I made yesterday about the tweetup before we got together, having never met me before.  There's something to this whole new media, blogging, social networking thing! ;)

Another outcome of the meetup for me is that I'll start using RSS more again.  Previously I got so overwhelmed that I stopped using an RSS reader altogether.  I'm going to look into Cullect, something I learned about last night that helps separate out the good stuff in your RSS reader from the noise.

Wow!  Two posts in two days.  I'm pretty sure that's a first for me (but probably not the last).  Thanks to everyone last night for the inspiration!