Barcelona Bloggers share insight and ideas over dinner

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)

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.