Barcelona Bloggers share insight and ideas over dinner

Categories: Europe, EventsPosted on November 15th, 2007

It’s obvious form the culture in Barcelona that it’s a community of sharing. I realized this as we passed plates and plates of tapas within a crowded restaurant to each over beers and passing ideas. It wasn’t just about the amazing tapas, but ideas, relationships, URLs and business cards were being shared about.

Last night, the Barcelona blogging community culminated at the Buda Bar, a very upscale lounge suggested by Maria Sipka and Daniella (both of Linqia), our gracious community hostesses. About 30 individuals came out in this open city, and I learned that many were web entrepreneurs from other countries around the world. I’ve kicked off these bloggers dinners at various cities that I visit, and it’s really for the community, and the chance to meet those that I often interact with online, where the focus is on community, not any individual.

I think I could really get used to the Barcelona lifestyle. After work, I enjoyed drinks with colleagues and tapas, I returned to my room, took a nap, got cleaned up, and headed out to more socializing on the town, followed by supper at 10, if not later. My doctor tells me that many small meals is better than the large mega meals that we have in America twice or three times a day.

One notable conversation started with the open source movement, and we quickly started to note that many of these software movements lack solid marketing strategy to mainstream consumers. We started to talk about what could fix this issue and the concept of ‘open source marketing’ or ‘open marketing’ could deliver this. What would this look like? A combination of evangelism from established marketers doing pro bono work, and the collaboration from global marketers to help with the variety of skills that many developers do not have.

In my hand, I have business cards froms companies such as ecaptia, migoa, rollingtalks, ITnet, neurona, onetomarket, and emascaro. While this is not the first time this group has met (some knew each other from previous events) it’s always intersting to witness people introducing themselves for the first time, and realizing they have an online relationship via blogs, and other social tools. Face to face is often a relationship sealer for many online relationships.

I took a few pictures below (please help tag with names, and I’ll correct titles) and recorded a few videos that I’ll publish in the coming weeks.

Thank you Barcelona bloggers, it was great meeting you all.

Tags: for this event are BarcelonabloggerNov07 (or just link to this Technorati page)

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Europe, Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Aye, I love Barça so much, I have a condominium there.

Posted by Prolific Programmer on November 15th, 2007 at 11:13 pm

I know that tapas place — I liked it so much I went there twice when I was in Barcelona last year!

Posted by Rachel Luxemburg on November 15th, 2007 at 11:21 pm

Hi again Jeremiah,

Was a pleasure gathering with you and the Barcelona bloggers and web entrepreneurs. As you see Barcelona is becoming a kind of South-European Silicon Valley

Thanks for the mention to the ‘open marketing’ conversation, I have been thinking in this concept for a while, and it is really ‘exciting’, we need to keep talking, and thinking about, as we yesterday did. Thanks again for everything!

Posted by Tomy Pelluz on November 16th, 2007 at 1:22 am

It was really nice the drinks and tapas! And for sure, the video moment defining the open-marketing was awesome!

Hope to see you again in Barcelona!

Posted by Sergio on November 16th, 2007 at 1:22 am

@Tomy stay tuned for the video….

@Sergio I look to return soon.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on November 16th, 2007 at 1:33 am

Good to hear you enjoyed the international community in Barcelona. See you next time in Barcelona or somewhere else. I love to share ideas together next time again!

Posted by Lennert de Rijk on November 16th, 2007 at 2:46 am

[...] Ayer por la noche Jeremiah Owyang invito a los bloggers de Barcelona a reunirse en el Buda Bar para un intercambio de ideas y opiniones: el Barcelona Bloggers Dinner. [...]

Posted by Ollivier Jacq » Blog Archive » Barcelona Bloggers Dinner ayer por la noche on November 16th, 2007 at 3:40 am

Jeremiah

If you are interested in Open Source Marketing, take a look at the excellent ChangeThis manifesto written by James Cherkoff on ‘What is Open Source Marketing?”.
http://www.changethis.com/14.OpenSourceMktg

James and Johnnie Moore also run a great “Open Sauce Live” workshop to introduce brands to the concept of just letting go.
http://collaboratemarketing.com/opensaucelive/

James’ Modern Marketing blog is also worth a look.
http://www.collaboratemarketing.com/modernmarketing/

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Interim CRM Manager

Posted by Graham Hill on November 16th, 2007 at 4:30 am

Thanks Graham, I’ve been reading Cherkoff’s Manifesto, and is great.

Posted by Tomy Pelluz on November 16th, 2007 at 8:59 am

Too bad I was not able to come.
Hopefully, we can make something similar in Paris/France in the near future.

Posted by Branislav Peric on November 16th, 2007 at 12:02 pm

[...] Jeremiah left some thoughts about the meeting in his blog and also some pics in flickr:barcelonabloggernov07. Publicado el 17/11/2007 en [...]

Posted by Cvander » Barcelona Blogger Dinner and some OpenMarketing discussion on November 17th, 2007 at 1:50 am

Graham

I checked out the PDF, pretty cool stuff.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on November 17th, 2007 at 11:59 am

Hey Jeremiah! Thanks for being a true catalyst and gathering a somewhat disjointed web 2.0 community together. A few of us feel stronger than ever to continue the discussions and inject some of the Silicon Valley spirit into this “Entrepreneurial Living City”. If you know of any burnt out talents in the Valley who want to indulge in the Barcelona lifestyle - send them our way! Maria