THE first Social Media Cafe (#smc_mcr) in Manchester turned out to be a great success with around 80 people turning up.
And the variety of skills, backgrounds and interests was also impressive and I am sure the networking and conversations generated have enabled some new connections to take place.
The event was hung around the talk of the death of blogging, with myself, Martin Byrant and Chi-chi Ekweozor ably guided by Sarah Hartley.
Also a thank you to Julian Tait for the organisation side of things as he made it very easy for people to chat and see where others were from.
On to the talk and clearly if you put a gaggle of bloggers in a room and ask them if blogging is on the way out, they are not likely to agree, although shorter forms of communication such as Twitter have enjoyed massive popularity.
One of the things I stressed was that your blog can be a base so that you can feed your online life backwards and forwards, allowing you room to express longer ideas and thoughts on the blog, with creative photography appearing on sites like Flickr and short form blogging appearing on Twitter.
If you are looking to create a presence and highlight your work, produced in whatever format, I think the 'blog as base' is very important.
What else came up for discussion?
Absolutely loads really, to get a quick overview take a look at the messages written to Twitter about what happened on the night and the thoughts and post-talk articles of attendees.
And I suppose that's one of the beauties of this networked world we are now involved in, with a blog post or two and a few tweets thrown in, 80 people can be gathered in a room putting faces to avatars.
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