As a meetup.com meetup organizer, I get promotional emails from the service, and I received a rather interesting one yesterday. Apparently Starbucks has realized that a service that had over 54,000 meetings in the month of May alone needs places to hold those meetings. So they’ve rolled out a pilot program in VA, DC & MD, whereby you can find a local Starbucks to host your meeting. It’s obvious what Starbucks gets out of it, but what does the meeting get out of it?

Well, for a start they’re going to give you reserved seating for your party, that’s a huge one, especially if you’re meeting in a busy location. They also state that they’re going to give your meeting extra promotion, and give you support. While that may just mean that they write your meeting up on a whiteboard behind the counter, it’s still something.

If you run a meetup in the VA, DC, MD area, all you have to do is email starbucks at meetup.com and you may have one of the meeting setup headaches taken care of for you.

Are you curious as to who has checked out your linkedin profile? Well, this week linkedin has implemented a new feature that gives you an idea of who has taken a gander at your information. As you can see below, it list the organization, and sometimes the type of role that they have in that organization, but it doesn’t list the actual person. How is this useful? Well it can make you think about who you may know at the organization that’s looked at you, and potentially send them a linkedin request, or if you’re looking for a job at a company / working on a contract with a potential client, you can see whether someone from that company has done this level of due diligence on you, and maybe it’ll give you a good feeling that it’s moving forwards, as long as you’ve done a decent job on your linkedin profile…

I’ve been watching the SEM meet-ups in Denver, Philadelphia, Seattle, etc with envious eyes. Why wasn’t there a group out here, right by the nation’s capital? That’s right Virginia deserves to have a place for Search Engine Marketers to network, chat, exchange tips & tricks, or just laugh about some horribly spammy linking method that was just discovered, with other people who’d get the joke. So I contacted Debra Mastaler, as the closest big name SEM that I knew of, to ask her if she was aware of such a group. She wasn’t, and thanked me for volunteering to set something up… that’ll teach me.

So, tonight, I went ahead and set up a Virginia SEM meetup group (apparently there are 8 people on meetup.com that have been waiting for this group to be created, I guess they just didn’t want the hassle of setting it up… thanks again Debra) I haven’t set a date/location for a first meeting, as I’d like to see how many people sign up, and where they’re located. More likely than not, it’ll be somewhere in Fairfax county, or down towards Richmond in the first 1/2 of May. If you’re from the area (heck we’ll even take people from DC, Southern Maryland, and West Virginia) pop on over and sign up, and see you soon.

In July of 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp purchased MySpace for $580 million, so that they could gain access to the, at that time, 22 million registered users. Since that time, News Corp. has done a great job of leveraging synergies between their properties, driving traffic from MySpace to it’s other sites, from new movie releases, to Fox sports sites, to American Idol. So, given the demographic breakdown of Digg, wouldn’t it make sense for the Dirty Digger (as he’s been referred to by the British press, although mostly lately by the satirical magazine Private Eye, since around 1968) to make a play to add Digg to the News Corp. portfolio?

Well, what would it cost him? Well, investment in Digg is $11.5 million, and VC’s typically want 10-20x return on an investment, so a price of $150 to $200 million would probably be expected given the hype around Digg. Since Digg recently reported that they have 1 million registered users, that would make each registered user worth $150 at the lower end of the spectrum, way higher than the $26 per user paid for MySpace, but it still might be worth it, after all Mr. Murdoch’s own mySpace page does state that his hobby is global domination…