Some good regional tech news to push out to people at the Bloomington Geek Dinner tonight at Michael’s Uptown Cafe tonight at 6p: Indiana is having a Blog conference next month (two of them, actually There is another one by Blog Indiana in August at IUPUI).
Blog IN event coming April 26
Mark your calendars. It’s official. We’re having a Blog IN on Saturday, April 26 from 1pm to 5pm at IUPUI School of Informatics in Indianapolis. Our goal is to attract as many bloggers as we can from around the state for a half-day of fun, learning, relationship building, tip sharing, and more.We are planning some fun surprises to help raise awareness about the power of blogs (and bloggers) to make a difference in our state. We also want to help newbies get started, so the event will have something for veteran bloggers and tire-kickers alike.
More information will follow in the coming week, but the plan is to spend an afternoon in late April hosting an unconference-style gathering of bloggers publishing from Indiana. Here in Bloomington, we have a sizeable blogosphere, much of it coming out of the IU School of Informatics. It isn’t a great time for most students—the last Saturday before finals week here at IUB—but it is a great opportunity for local bloggers to make an impact on forming interest and setting policy for Indiana technology and communication.
I’m going to be talking to the SOI administration to see if it is possible to sponsor a bus to the event and include other local bloggers for the ride north. Join the Smaller Indiana discussion group to keep in the loop.
Related to this … Smaller Indiana is planning a coordinated pre-event event on April 14 (the first Monday after returning from CHI in Florence, Italy, for many HCI students and faculty). Indiana bloggers are being asked to gather at the Circle monument in Indianapolis at noon that day, rain or shine, armed with laptops with the hope of live-blogging the event. For those of us who won’t be able to make the hour drive north in the middle of a school day, Bloomington and other satellite cities are going to plan our own version of the noon gathering. As SI organizer Pat Coyle wrote,
“We want to show the world that Indiana is a tech-savvy location.”