LA Wordpress Users Group
The Grove
I attended the first ever Los Angeles WordPress Users Group yesterday at The Farmers Market in LA. I’ve never been to The Farmers Market before so it was a pretty cool experience. Typically when I’m in LA I got to downtown or the west side never where the farmers market is at. I parked in The Grove parking lot since I didnt have cash to pay for the parking near the farmers market. I was a bit early so I took a stroll around The Grove so I could tell Jen about it. It’s an open air mall with a great water feature and places for kids to play and a food court.
The Users Group
12:00 came around quickly and I made my way to the Farmers Market. I found the Starbucks that was listed in the directions and then walked inside to see the actual farmers market. Shops, food an walk up eaterys were intermingled. It was interesting to see how they all worked together, people buying poultry at one place and crepes or mexican food in another. Sandwich shops, tourist info and LA themed items along with produce were all over the place there. I made my way to the place that was selling delicious smelling crepes and saw Douglas E Welch along with Jason Cosper. They were commandeering adjacent tables as they became free and I sat down at one of them and greeted everyone. It seems as if most of the people knew each other to some extent. I knew 2 people and only one of which I’ve met before, Douglas. It’s funny, I met Dougas at the Podcamp AZ event held late last year and now I’m meeting him at another event. We also had him recently talk at the OC Podcasters meetup a few months back too.
This meeting was mainly just a meet and greet, there was no structure to it and no set agenda. I talked to the people around me and nodded at the folks at the other end of the table. Jokingly someone asked if there was an IRC backchannel we can all participate in. Andy from netZoo cranked up his MacBook and got on yahoo’s live service to stream some of the event while also checking the scores of his fave baseball team. Slowly people were getting up to grab some food from the places here at the market. I strolled around a bit and went to the crepes place to get an egg and ham with sun dried tomatoes, it was delicious. Next time I think I’ll try the Nutella with strawberries those seemed to be selling fast. I talked to some of the people there about my wordpress installations and the various hacks and plugins I used with them. It seemed like most of the people there we’re bloggers and only a few of us were Podcasters. I think thats why I didn’t know many of them since it’s a variation of the same animal with the only commonality being a blogging platform and RSS for delivery.
Podcamp
After the event and some group pictures (see below) I stuck around for a bit to talk with Jason about the Podcamp Socal (LA?) event. We talked about possible known locations to hold the event and various people we should get involved in the planning of it. He’s done a few Barcamps and other events in the past so it was good to talk to him and get a feel for what I was getting myself into. I was very pleased what I heard and after talking to him I think that SoCal does need a PodCamp even more than I realized.
[HTML1]
