Preuss isn’t quite as prominent as some of the other departing people; as the product manager for local advertising, he may, for example, be less missed than a key AdSense developer or the vice president of corporate development.  Still, it’s a good bet that Google didn’t want to lose him to Meetup.

Meetup describes itself as the “world’s largest community of local Meetups, clubs and groups.”  Preuss will begin there as the vice president of marketplace.  And in the event that you’re getting even slightly lost in all of this jargon, Peter Kafka interpreted the move.

“In English, that means Dominic is going to try to create a new revenue stream for Meetup by matching sponsors with Meetups, and taking a small cut for itself,” he wrote.  “Smart idea: Right now Meetup sponsorships (Wilson Sonsoni and DFJ Gotham sponsor NY Tech, for example) are done ad hoc, and Meetup doesn’t see a penny of this revenue.”

Given his background at Google, Preuss should definitely know a thing or two about making money.  Hopefully that’ll serve him well at his new job.

Entrepreneurs, VCs, IT professionals, bloggers all congregate each month to not only network with one another, but to also see the latest in the online frontier.

First up

boorah.com – Eric Moyer, co-founder

Boorah.com makes it easy to find a great restaurant by presenting a summary of user and professional reviews in a way that has never been done before. The service offers a unique, searchable database of restaurant locations, cuisines, cost, and hours of operation coupled with the ability to make online reservations. Boorah supposedly simplifies the process of dining out whether you’re a “foodie” or just an average Joe looking for a fresh new place to eat.

The Boorah system uses patent-pending Natural Language Processing technology to find, summarize and present information from across the web in a way that is far more useful than it’s ever been before.

I guess we’ll see if NLP outweighs P2P (peer to peer with sites such as Yelp.com)

–

stickydrive.com – Sol Lipman, co-founder

I met Sol at a recent SF Beta event. His idea is pretty cool. It’s basically a flash platform that you take with you. What that means is that users of portable, aka thumb aka USB, drives can take applications with them so that they can fire-up everything they need as long as a PC is handy.

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twiki.org – Peter Thoeny, founder

TWiki is an enterprise collaboration platform. It is a Structured Wiki, typically used to run a project development space, a document management system, a knowledge base, or any other groupware tool, on an intranet or on the internet. Web content can be created collaboratively by using just a browser. Users without programming skills can create web applications. Developers can extend the functionality of TWiki with Plugins.

–

zemble.com – Johann Moonesinghe, co-founder

Zemble.com is the social networking website that helps you interact with your friends through text messaging.

You can text message large groups of friends from your phone by sending just one text message, and it goes out to the whole group. The service also allows you to choose if you want to respond to the entire group or just the person who sent you the text.

Users can use Zemble to organize their (lives) with robust event-management features including a social networking calendar.

–

Location provided by: DLA Piper

Wine provided by: AndrewLane Wines

Beer provided by: mepath.com – health advice meets web2.0

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Brian Solis is principal at FutureWorks PR, an award-winning PR and Social Media agency founded in 1999. FW PR bridges the communications gap between companies and their customers, and between products and their specific benefits for their target markets. Solis blogs at PR2.0, http://www.briansolis.com, and regularly contributes to many industry trades. He is also frequently quoted in articles relating to technology trends and Marketing/PR strategies.

Kudos to Vincent Lauria for growing into a monthly must-attend meetup.

This time around, we tried something a bit different – video instead of pictures! Alison McNeill was out there interviewing the presenters to help viewers get a better sense and perspective of each featured company.

Fanpop – Founder Dave Lu

Fanpop represents a new generation of portals, what they call “social portals” created for the people by the people. It’s a one-stop destination for fans of anything and everything and the place to find fellow devoted fans.

Radio Handi – Founder Brian McConnell

Radio Handi is a suite of group communication and mobile broadcasting services, now accessible in over 30 countries worldwide.

ZapTix - Founder Christian Perry

ZapTix empowers performance groups, organizations, companies, conventions, and individuals to sell tickets and organize events online (and also stick it to Ticketmaster.)

YouSendIt - Florian Brody

YouSendIt lets businesses, professionals and consumers move big files, up to 100MB, quickly, easily, and securely.

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Brian Solis is principal at FutureWorks PR, an award-winning PR and Social Media agency founded in 1999. FW PR bridges the communications gap between companies and their customers, and between products and their specific benefits for their target markets. Solis blogs at PR2.0, http://www.briansolis.com, and regularly contributes to many industry trades. He is also frequently quoted in articles relating to technology trends and Marketing/PR strategies.

It’s always nice to get together for a few beers and some great conversation during the cold weather – and it was just such a night that spawned the first mesh conference. Startup types, venture capitalists (please leave the calculators at home), marketing people, geeks and even journalists are welcome.

Want to talk about Google and YouTube? Copyright and the Web? The Wal-Mart/Edelman fiasco? Come on down. Sign up at the Upcoming page if you’re interested, or just show up and get your Web 2.0 on. A map and directions to the Embassy can be found here.

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Mathew Ingram is a
technology writer and blogger for the Globe and Mail, a national
newspaper based in Toronto, and also writes about the Web and media at
www.mathewingram.com/work and www.mathewingram.com/media.

Social networking and community sites attracted an astounding 70% of mothers online. In addition, 13% of MySpace visitors are moms. My bet is they are checking out what their kids are doing online. In addition, Meetup, a site that helps people with similar interests find each other, has garnered more than 35,000 stay-at-home mother members.

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Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.

Personally, I really enjoyed the discussion with Mike Arrington, hearing his perspective and opinion on new media trends was insightful, and I think he shared some practical (and probably more important, actionable) tips for companies that want to engage with the blogging community.

Jeremy “The Paparazzi” Pepper has a recording of the conversation posted here, plus some photos for those that couldn’t make it. I’ll also just add that I enjoyed meeting and mingling with my Bay Area PR peeps: Josh, Tiffany, I owe you both a beer.

We already have a good topic and another great speaker cooking for next month, details will be posted to the Third Thursday meetup page, so register there to get our updates. And thanks to everyone who came out to support this last night, especially Jeremy, Giovanni and Phil for helping to pull this thing together.

Related Posts

First Third Thursday Event was a blast (Mike Arrington)

Third Thursday … with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch (Jeremy Pepper)

TechCrunch says “Wired’s gonna be my bitch” (Valleywag)

Third Thursday: Social Media in PR Meetup (Ryan Lack)

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Mike Manuel is the founder of the award winning Media Guerrilla blog. Media Guerrilla is an insiders take on the practice of technology public relations with a focus on the issues, tactics and trends that are specific to the tech industry.

Visit Media Guerrilla …

Arrington is the founder of edgeio and the author of TechCrunch, a highly influential blog about Web 2.0 trends and technology. Arrington will be joining us to talk about the do’s and don’ts of engaging the blogging community, where TechCrunch has had success working with companies, along with any insights, anecdotes, advice he might have for using new media in PR and marketing programs.

This meetup will be held at Fanny & Alexander’s in downtown Palo Alto from 6:30-8:30PM on the back patio (discussion to begin 7-ish). Attendance is free, but please register in advance via our meetup page. We plan to capture and share each meetup via the typical outlets (e.g., podcast, blog entries, photos, tags, etc.), so if you can’t make it, no worries, we’ll do our best to extend the reach of Third Thursday online. In fact, if you can help with any of this, please let me know.

If back channel interest and enthusiasm for this meetup thus far is any indication of how necessary this sort of thing is, Third Thursday should be a very valuable event for local PR and marketing folks.

See you next Thursday, the first round’s on these guys.

Related Posts:

Hello, My Name is “Third Thursday”

SF/SV PR MeetUp (Jeremy Pepper)

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Mike Manuel is the founder of the award winning Media Guerrilla blog. Media Guerrilla is an insiders take on the practice of technology public relations with a focus on the issues, tactics and trends that are specific to the tech industry.

Visit Media Guerrilla …

So, today I am going to write about blogging. And, PR bloggers. And, well, best practices and why I seem to get so hyper about best practices … pretty much pointing to a test I took online (and the new cool fun little icon on the left hand, bottom side).

Jeremy Pepper, Tom Biro
Originally uploaded by philgomes.

But, let’s talk about PR. It was interesting, because the other day I was talking to another PR person about the PR blogosphere. Say that really fast.

My point was that most of us have a respect for each other, and occasionally share best practices. Yes, it is a competition as we all work at competing agencies, but at the same time we do not go around looking to stab each other in the back … well, most of us, those of us who are not too big for their britches and then link (in false modesty) to people saying calling them a “guru.”

PR is about growth, and it’s about the next generation. It’s about moving the industry forward, not moving one’s ego forward. It’s about the community as a whole, and helping that community grow. Why do I comment and link to the posts from Auburn students? Did I have any connection to them prior to two years ago? Not at all – but I caught a link to my blog, went to the page, embarrassed the girl … and became involved for the past two years. Do I have any real vested interest (besides the hope that they send me Auburn schwag?). No – but I do have a vested interest in the future of PR.

The same goes for the blogging PR students from SMU – they were out there asking questions via email and on comments, and some PR bloggers responded. And, likely, some PR bloggers thought it was beneath them.

Me & Jeremy
Originally uploaded by philgomes.

But, that’s the wrong attitude. Because, well, if we are not there for the students of PR – and, as noted by Edelman’s Rick Murray (he’s the guy in the corner), there is a desperate need for it – then, who will help? I work with the interns as well, to school them about blogs and blog search and smart blog practices, and it is not for me, but to help them in their careers.

As to that, I am leaking information on a group that was proposed by Mike Manuel, and which I, Giovanni Rodriguez and Phil Gomes are part of: Third Thursday.

The goal for Third Thursday is to share best ideas – and, no, this is not some ego event like the dead Going the Distance – but this is a group of PR bloggers that believe in moving the industry forward. It is about best practices, to hopefully kill stupid ideas … like this one from Fleishman Hillard. But, it is all okay because FH apologized (from O’Dwyer’s – subscription required): Fleishman-Hillard says it was wrong to “blog” about the disappearance of 12 giant St. Louis Cardinals redbirds from billboards in the St. Louis area without saying that it was in on the heist.

Yep, FH staffers went around to various message boards for fans of the St. Louis Cardinals’ baseball team, and posted about “where the birds?!?” that went missing … only to appear on the radio station billboard. So much for transparency in PR, which is one of the things that I have been harping on for the past year … and heard mainly the chirping of crickets from the silence, or little girls giggling about the issue.

03-03-06_0842.jpg
Originally uploaded by david parmet.

But, a junior staffer at Bite decided to pick up the baton … one that had been sitting desolate on the ground for quite a while … and go run with it. Why he did not post to the Bite Blog, I have no idea … but he wrote it on Silicon Valley Watcher. He had some good points, the comments had some good points, but at the end of the day, is it that hard to disclose on a blog what you are doing (Bite, by the way, needs to disclose that Plaxo is a client, if that is why Plaxoed is such a favorite). Does PR want to sully its hands by doing guerrilla campaigns that lack transparency? How are we going to work in the new media, and how do we do it smart? That’s a question on both transparency and moving us forward (and, hopefully, one we will figure out on Third Thursdays).

So, the PersonalDNA part – well, just read the page, and you will understand why I am the way I am about blogging, and transparency and why I think some people are bad for both PR and blogging … and you can see the fun graphic on my page now.

Originally uploaded by Brian Oberkirch.

Oh, the pictures above? Those are just a handful of the PR bloggers that get it (and that I have photos with myself with). Tom Biro (full disclosure, sister firm) gets it. Phil Gomes gets it. Brian Oberkirch gets it. Josh Hallett gets it. Mike Manuel gets it. David Parmet gets it. Shel Israel gets it (although we argue about what it is at times).

No, that’s not an exhaustive list. Check out the Auburn students, the instructor and Forward – they get it. Check out Robert Ricci (disclosure, he’s a colleague). Check out Giovanni Rodriguez – although I think a recent post lacked transparency, he gets it. Check out Constantin Basturea and the Texas PR Bloggers …

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Jeremy Pepper is the CEO and founder of POP! Public Relations, a public relations firm based in Arizona, USA.

He authors the popular Musings from POP! Public Relations blog which offers Jeremy’s opinions and views – on public relations, publicity and other things.

If you’re interested in search, I think this one will be interesting to you. I was pretty hard on this team cause they are in the #3 spot. We talk about Google, noise, spam, and lots of other stuff.

I’m off to fly down to Silicon Valley. See ya tonight. I’ll be going to the TechCrunch Meetup, but will be there a bit late.

Description from Channel 9 site:

Andy Edmonds, lead program manager, and Erik Selberg are two of the geeks who work on making MSN Search better. They talk about how the engine works, and what they’re doing to beat the competition. Watch me give them a bit of heck about being behind the other major engines. You’ll enjoy this frank talk from the team.

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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