Over the last 24 hours, I've attended two excellent local tweet-ups. Unlike the usual social events, these tweet-ups were more than social, they were cause-oriented. Last night I attended The Pitch, an awesome meeting devoted to Thoughts on the future of publishing organized by Jason Preston. About 20 people debated the viability of the newspaper in today's wired world. Kathy Gill pointed out the importance of newspapers to community and the fact that technologies like electronic ink will make newspapers viable for a long time. As Kathy said, "newspapers are going to stick around longer than the early adopter geeks think." Journalist Monica Guzman stated "the internet is doing wonderful things for journalism. We'd be busting out the party hats if we could afford them". She felt that it may not be worth the effort to find a business model that supports a daily. At the end of the night, we voted 13-4 that print daily newspapers would not exist 25 years from now. You can read the rest of the tweets here.
Early this morning, I attended a different kind of tweet-up organized by likemind. Likemind is an organization which plans meetups all around the world on the same day. The topics may differ, but the date is always the same. likemind Seattle is organized by Jason Gingold, an online advertising strategist. This morning was a light crowd, but it turns out that each of us had worked in the account planning/strategy world and had a NY background. Small world, go figure. Given the composition of the audience, then it should be no surprise that we talked about the social webs and energizing community for politics. And the always witty, Tim Frommer kept us laughing and thinking. likemind Seattle will put together a survey for the discussion topic of the next meeting, so follow him to learn about it in advance.
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