The birth of Beer & Blog Las Vegas

“Who would have thought that all this would have grown out of WordCamp:Las Vegas?” That’s a question I’ve been asked several times over the past few weeks while attending Beer & Blog.

If you haven’t heard, Beer & Blog is a weekly meeting that takes place on Thursday nights at the Freakin’ Frog. A group of Las Vegas blogging and social media enthusiasts get together to talk about all aspects of blogging and social networking.

The idea for beer & blog was introduced to me by Aaron Hockley, who I met while organizing the WordCamp:Las Vegas conference. Aaron was organizing a similar conference in Oregon and mentioned to me that he was interested in speaking on the topic of Beer & Blog and how it has helped to explode the tech scene up in Oregon. After hearing his explanation, I knew this would be an excellent opportunity to bring the Las Vegas blogging community together and hopefully start our own group. I invited Aaron to speak at WordCamp, and to say that his message was well received would be a tremendous understatement! Before the end of the conference, one of the attendees, Jackie Mason, had already contacted the folks at Beer & Blog and we were set up with our own Las Vegas chapter. 4 short days later, using Twitter as the main source of promotion, we had our first Beer & Blog event with roughly 30 people in attendance.

I’ve tried in the past to coordinate weekly/monthly meetings to talk about blogging over beers, but it has been difficult to gain interest and the idea would end up being scrapped. So why is working this time? I think the answer is WordCamp. At WordCamp we had a room FULL of people who are already interested in blogging and were taking steps to better their blogging through education from other like-minded individuals. When Aaron introduced them all to the idea of Beer & Blog, the lightbulb went on over all their heads. I had a dozen people come up to me asking if we were going to get something like that going here in Las Vegas. The interest was definitely there. All it needed now was somebody to step up and set the date. Jackie stepped up, made it happen and the rest, as they say, is history.

While it’s too early to tell how the group will hold together over the long haul, the early results are impressive. We had 30 people in attendance that first week, a little over 20 people the second week and a very impressive 40 person turn-out last night.

So, to answer that question, “Who would have thought…?”, the answer is me. I knew Las Vegas had a passionate group of bloggers and I’m thrilled that we are finding each other and sharing our knowledge over a pint of beer.

Come join us and help put the “Social” back in social networking.