Weblog
May 9, 03:41 pm: Week 7: It's all upcoming
By now, you are developing a strong online presence. You should be continuing to add feeds to your reader, friends to your twitter stream. You are blogging and watching your own audience grow. It’s time to start connecting your online work with the face-to-face events.
Upcoming is an event listing service. You’ll need to sign up (you should use a name consistent with your other services to make it easy for people recognize you). Of course, you want to fill out your profile, pointing to the blog that you’ve been working on. The service is pretty straightforward. Spend some time clicking around and looking at how it’s set up. Pay particular attention to the groups. You might not find anyin your topic area but you might find some groups that have the kind of people you want to connect to. They might be techies or activists or political groups. Join the ones that look interesting.
Now that you’ve spent some time looking around. Sign up for some events. Don’t worry, right now, about whether or not they are in your area. You can say that you are watching them. This will help expose you to other people who may be interested in the same topics you are. Like many of these services, you can “friend” people which can also be a good way to find events.
So why are you doing this? Well, the point of using these tools isn’t to use them and build up a lot of web friends. Though that can be nice. The point is to use these tools to make change and coming together with people, in a physical place, just can’t be underestimated. This exercise is to start getting you thinking about the kind of events that happen in your area, either geographical or topical.
As you continue your work over the coming weeks, you’ll have occasions to add things to upcoming. It’s easy to do and you don’t have to be an event organizer to make that happen. And, I’ll prepare you know, host a few events of your own.
This is an easy week. Keep the practice going.
(Photo credit: The Birds by Anthony & Farren)
