Executive summary: It was a good start.

There were snacks, mingling, a Q&A with Jason DeRusha ^[1] and Eric Black ^[2], the WCCO Local Ad Network ^[3] commercial, and then prizes.

Good Stuff:

• I actually met people that live here and blog here that I had never met or even heard of before. New people! So nice job to WCCO for reaching waaaay out (and to the intern who was probably responsible for combing lists of blogs and finding contact info). When I say I loved this part I mean I LURVED this part.
• We had time to mingle. Just hang around and talk to people.
• They gave us the keys to the Twitter account ^[4] and trusted us to use them for good, not for evil. Participants’ thoughts can be found at @WCCObloginar ^[4].
• Decent turn out. There were probably about 30 people there, not including all the ‘CCO staffers. They sent out about 400 emails, got about 50 RSVPs, expected about 10 people to actually show up, had about 30 attendees, and there were folks there that hadn’t gotten an email but had seen it here or on MNspeak. Not bad.

Needs Improvement:

• The Q&A topic focused on bloggers/citizen journalists/professional journalists doing social media/online vs print/etc. This was news to some, old hat for some, and just plain boring for some.
• Related to the previous point, since they are apparently drawing a diverse audience, I’d like to see an effort to appeal to other niches of bloggers. I’d hate to lose the interest of people that showed up last night who aren’t hanging out in the citizen journalist (and loose relations) corner of the web.
• Man alive, Jason is chatty. On the flip, he very eloquently articulates his experience with and opinion on these matters.

Punctuated by this event and last weekend’s Public Radio Camp ^[5], it’s abundantly clear that MPR and WCCO are head and shoulders above the other MSM joints in town on finding ways to interact with their online-savvy audience. I really appreciate WCCO’s willingness to give this a go. The format and topics and lots of things about it are going to continue to evolve.

Random thought I had: I might consume tv news if they video podcasted individual segments like sports, top news, investigative, etc. I could do four minutes a day.

I was very proud to have four Metbloggers in the house. Greg ^[6], Jason ^[7], David ^[8] and I were all there and I finally got to actually meet David.

And a huge thank you to all who came up to me to say hi. I was especially pleased to have talked to Amy Rea of Knit Think ^[9] and Flyover Land ^[10], Angelique of Saucy Dame Delux ^[11], Lisa of Corporate Babysitter ^[12], and Terry Yzaguirre of MPLS Mirror ^[13].

Other posts on the event: [Alie ^[14]] [Jeremy ^[15]] [mnspeak ^[16]] [Eric Black ^[17]] [mnblue ^[18]] [Internet Marketing Blog ^[19]] [mspmag ^[20]]

If you’ve got a write up and I missed it, drop it in the comments, please!