Last night I went to the November Shanghai Weblogger Meet-up. It was a group of about a dozen webloggers meeting in a nice apartment, eating Papa John's pizza, and talking about stuff (somewhat) related to weblogs. Fons Tuinstra was there, as well as featured guest Andrew Lih, journalism prof at Hong Kong University. Most of the time was spent talking about journalism and current events, Clash of Civilizations. The evening's topics had a highly journalistic bent to them, because of the guest speaker and because most of the people attending (or at least, most of the talkative ones) were journalists by profession. Other topics included RSS feeds, an enthusiastic recommendation to check out Bloglines, accessing Gmail smoothly from China (use https), and podcasting.

Personally, I think there's waaaay too much hype surrounding pod-casting, most people don't realize that implementing it just involves uploading audio files to the web server and adding a couple new tags to your RSS feed text file. No new file formats or amazing software involved. Even implementing a podcasting client would be extremely simple.

That said, the discussion of pod-casting did remind me of something. After work yesterday, John asked me if I had any plans for this month's pay; I told him that I planned to save it and build up a little nest egg before I make any large purchases. But the podcasting discussion reminded me that for a long time, probably going on a dozen years now, I've wanted a minidisk player. For one, it plays music in digital CD quality. Second, you can swap disks with other friends who own minidisk players. Third and key, you can buy a good microphone and record ambient sound with it, eg concerts, and street noises. The alternative would be to buy a good MP3 player. 考虑考虑.

Anyways, back to the Weblogger Meetup.

I'll probably try to make the next one. Fons says that we could probably get Isaac Mao, China blogger evangelist, to attend. That would be cool, as I can see the conversation steering more towards blogging technology and local China webloggers. It was fun mentioning Wang Jianshuo to somebody other than John and getting a chuckle.