Monday, May 3, 2010

Blogger Meetups at NGS 2010

One of the highlights for me at genealogy conferences is meeting with my genea-blogger colleagues. We had over 35 genea-bloggers at the NGS 2010 Conference in Salt Lake City last week, out of over 2,500 conference attendees.

Through the magic of Facebook and cell phones, Linda and I managed to find and enjoy the company of a number of genea-bloggers. Here are some of my pictures:

1) On Wednesday night, we connected with Lisa Alzo and Donna Pointkouski at the Red Rock Brewery:



2) On Friday night, before the showing of WDYTYA?, Linda and I had an enjoyable dinner at The Olive Garden with (from left) Sheri Fenley, Denise Levenick and Donna Pointkouski.


3) There was a Blogger's Row at the Friday night Ancestry.com showing of Who Do You Think You Are? at the Convention Center, and we were posed against a wall with several other bloggers from the audience. The group below is (from the left) Megan Smolenyak, Lou Szucs, Randy Seaver, Kathleen Doyle, Maureen Taylor, Diane Haddad, Steve Danko, Sheri Fenley, Donna Pointkouski and Elizabeth Hansford.



4) Janet Hovorka suggested a Bloggers lunch meetup on Saturday in the Convention Center, so we invited bloggers when we saw them and put the word out on Facebook and Twitter. The picture below shows (from left) Randy Seaver, Janet Hovorka, Lisa Alzo, Amy Urman, Madaleine Laird, Angela McGhie and Sheri Fenley. Dean Richardson left before the picture was taken, and A.C. Ivory joined the group just after the picture was taken:


There were, of course, blogger meetups that I didn't attend or even know about - I hope that pictures of those happenings will surface on blogs and on Facebook.

There is this wonderful camaraderie amongst genea-bloggers because we tend to know more about each, and we share the common experience of writing and posting for public consumption. The restaurant and food served doesn't matter - the important thing is enjoying each other's company, sharing experiences and news, and encouraging each other, which happens a lot in these meetups. Oh, the gossip, too!

8 comments:

Becky Thompson said...

Thanks for sharing, Randy! I'm sorry I missed the Sat noon meeting..I was knee deep in used books at Sam Weller's used book store downtown! We spent our last day there with family. But sure appreciated your invitation anyway.

Dr. Bill (William L.) Smith said...

Thanks for the great photos, Randy. Looks like a great time had by all. What fun it would have been to have been able to join you all there. Maybe another year!

Bill ;-)

http://drbilltellsancestorstories.blogspot.com/
Author of "Back to the Homeplace"
and "13 Ways to Tell Your Ancestor Stories"

Family Curator said...

Tx for posting the pic, Randy. It was great fun to have dinner with you and Linda while we were in SLC. See you at the Jamboree in June!

Sheri Fenley said...

What a great looking group of people! I had so much fun , oh and learned a thing or two along the way!

Janet Hovorka said...

So glad I got in on one of the meetups. It was so fun to see everyone stop by the booth though. Such fun. Can't wait to do it again in Burbank. And tell sweet Linda hi. What a great addition she is to the group--without even writing a single blog word. :-)
Janet

Taneya said...

great pictures! but we definitely need to get more people blogging - 35 out of 2500? man. all that knowledge that can be tapped into :-)

Renee said...

Hi Randy - It was great to meet you at the conference! I missed out on the Saturday Blogger get-together, but it looks like you all had a super time. We are putting together a NGS10 Photoloom account (open to the public) to host pictures from the conference. If you have any photos you'd like to include, just email them to me at renee(at)photoloom.com. (To give credit where credit is due, the idea and many of the photos came from Dovy at "Sharing Time.") I'll send you a link when we get it set up.

thesis writing said...

this kind of blog always useful for blog readers, it helps people during research. your post is one of the same for blog readers.