Like a BloggerCon
In her writeup, Sylvia Paull compares Friday's BBQ to early BMUG meetings. If Woz were there, he might compare it to the Homebrew club that met at Stanford in the early days of the PC. We all have our points of reference. To me, it was like the first BloggerCon.
Context & Ripple Effects
The post captures a familiar Silicon Valley ritual: attendees measuring an informal gathering against the legendary meetups of prior eras — Sylvia Paull reaching back to BMUG, and Woz's hypothetical comparison pointing to the Homebrew Computer Club's Stanford-era meetings, whose 30th anniversary drew a crowd just weeks later. The author's own reference point is BloggerCon, marking this BBQ as part of the mid-2000s blogging movement's community-building moment.
First-order effects
- The BBQ functions as social glue for the nascent blogging community — attendees leave with relationships and shared identity rather than content or deals.
- Each participant frames the event through their own generational touchstone (BMUG, Homebrew, BloggerCon), which immediately turns one dinner into a claim of historical continuity for the blogging scene.
Second-order effects
- The pattern invites imitation: peer-organized unconference-style gatherings multiply in the same season, with Microsoft's Mind Camp notes documenting the same self-organized format weeks later.
- As these gatherings accumulate coverage, they raise the blogosphere's perceived legitimacy — a dynamic visible in contemporaneous mainstream-media wrestling over bloggers' status.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, informal gatherings become durable institutions: each tech wave builds its own version of the Homebrew/BMUG/BloggerCon meetup, a lineage that later surfaces in events like Product Hunt's 1,000-person happy hour a decade on.
- Community formation increasingly shifts from formal conferences to low-friction social formats, changing where industry networks — and eventually deals and movements — actually get made.
The trend: Informal peer gatherings remain the connective tissue of successive technology movements, with each generation — Homebrew, BMUG, BloggerCon, and beyond — recreating the same small-room dynamic at new scale.