Last night I went to the Blip Festival at the Tank in New York. It was a great evening filled with chipmusic, 8bitlovers, geeky do-it-yourself-addicts and an abundant amount of Gameboys. I also met two great new media critics and fellow bloggers from kenspeckle & deeplinking.

8GB performing at the Blip Festival

I wrote a piece on the festival & Gijs Gieskes great performance for cut-up.com (thanks Rosa!)

More Blip Festival pictures at Flickr and videos at YouTube.

Saturday afternoon I went to one of New York City’s billions of Starbucks for the New York City WordPress November Meetup. Even though only a few people attended it was very interesting to meet fellow WordPress users and enthusiasts. WordPress was applauded for its ease of use, the fact that its free and that it has a huge developer community.

Easy to use

One person who attended the meeting had not even begun using WordPress yet and mainly came to the meeting to find out if WordPress is the right tool for his purpose. Other people set up some blogs for friends who had no computer knowledge at all. Because the WordPress interface is so easy, all these blogs are now actively used by people who hardly had any computer skills.

It’s free

The fact that it’s free is a big motivation for using the software. Nearly all WordPress plugins and themes are free too so you can customize your blog to your wishes.

The huge (developer) community

We often referred to all the wonderful people who make plugins and themes, write excellent articles on blogging and WordPress and answer questions on the forums. The fact that there is such a innovative community behind WordPress was a big choice in choosing WordPress.

Lorelle was mentioned a few times by other people as a major resource for excellent articles on blogging and WordPress:

What interested me most was that it is hard to talk about WordPress only. We talked a lot about WordPress plugins, themes, WordPress MU and shared some tips but we often went “offtopic” as well. We talked about content management systems in general, Joomla, photo editting software, hosting and various other programs and services.

WordPress and blog software are tightly knit into a web of services and software. You cannot talk about starting to blog with WordPress without talking about hosting and databases. It is hard to talk about WordPress and uploading pictures without talking about photo editing software or services such as Flickr. When we exchanged contact details I was really happy with my new MOO business cards, it makes it fun to exchange business cards!

The only negatives of the meeting were the fact that Starbucks has no free wifi and that it took forever to get a skim milk latte with sugar-free hazelnut syrup.

I also wrote a piece on this meetup and The Value of Meeting Your Fellow Bloggers – Offline! for the Blog Herald.

Things might get a little quiet around here because I am off to New York and suburban New Jersey for a month. I’ll be working on my thesis on Blog Software and Blog Search Engines. I am planning on going to the The New York City WordPress Meetup Group tomorrow, Saturday, November 17, 2007, 4:00 PM, if I am not too jetlagged.

Because life without blogging is difficult you can find my weekly musings on blogging and the blogosphere at the Blog Herald.

New York, New York! But actually it’s Brooklyn, Prospect Park, my wonderful 2006 view over the city.

I’m gone, on a holiday in New Jersey and New York, relaxing:

I brought some papers to read for my thesis but instead we are doing a synchronous Harry Potter 7 reading session at the pool:

It’s hot, 34C (93F), very sunny (I just bought a factor 70 sunscreen for my face) and the wine grapes are looking better every year:

We’re heading for Montreal, Canada on Monday. Holidays are wonderful.