I asked the meetup planner, David Lee, Founder & CEO of Shakr Media, a Seoul-based startup, to recap the meetup so that the rest of us could live vicariously through his notes (and video!).

Seoul's startup scene is going global in a big way, and earlier this month a group of ReadWriteWeb fans and Korean entrepreneurs gathered at Shakr Media HQ to talk about their startups at the first ReadWriteWeb Seoul meetup.

Seoul ReadWriteWeb Meetup from David Lee on Vimeo.

I kicked off the event with a post-Techcrunch Disrupt Beijing update from Shakr Media. We substantially increased the number of private beta users for Sha.kr, where you can watch automatically assembled video news based on written articles from across the web. But more importantly, we announced that towards the end of this month we are opening Sha.kr Create so anyone can create their own WebGL shows by uploading a few photos and video clips.

Xmon Games talked briefly about ZZOMS and Yummy Yummy, two iPhone games they launched from their game studio in Seoul. Kyoungho Kim, Co-CEO of Xmon Games gave his first ever presentation about his company in English. Co-CEOs Kim and Park are one of a number of startups in Korea benefiting from generous government R&D grants, which Kim describes briefly in his presentation. (R&D grants which I have very strong mixed feelings about, because of the bureaucracy partly, but more so because of the not-so-implicit expectation to commit fraud in some cases.)

Ahiku's product launch demo for Recood was next. Co-founder Is Koo ran through a quick demo, which boils down to a very simple take on Instagram for video. The story behind Ahiku is an interesting one... They started a few years ago with Terebe, a social video annotation site that had many of YouTube's current feature set, only that was 2 years earlier. They had trouble getting traction beyond Korea, and after deciding that they want to be a global company, made the tough decision to shutdown the service to focus on a simpler product. TwitOnAir, their next product, got scooped up by Korea's second largest telecom, KT. It is now Olleh OnAir. I'm looking forward to seeing Recood do well in the market next!

To wrap-up the event, Yohan Kim from Paprika Lab shared some of the numbers and methods behind their climb to success as the creator of Hero City, one of only two Facebook social games in Korea to have over 1 million users. What's especially interesting to note is that, despite a huge difference in the number of users on Cyworld vs. Facebook overall, Paprika Lab's Cyworld revenue is comparable to what they earn on Facebook.

Peter Kim from Uhuru unfortunately couldn't make it to the event, but he'll be around next time to share the story of Uhuru in more detail. It would have been nice to have him around, because his take on social video has a strong business model that goes far beyond ad impressions. Uhuru is a site where anyone can create video advertisements for brands, and brands can pick them up for commercial use. Peter is also the CEO of a seed fund & incubator in Korea, Applemint Holdings.

These entrepreneurs, investors and startup enthusiasts had a great time coming together. Thank you ReadWriteWeb for giving us one more excuse to gather and talk about what we love doing!

If you held a ReadWriteWeb meetup in your area that you'd like to recap or if you need help starting a ReadWriteWeb meetup in your area, please reach out to our Community Manager, Robyn Tippins for assistance.

As the lights dimmed on the second-floor of this swank, lounge-y spot in the Central West End neighborhood, we ate too much sushi, talked about the future of e-commerce and mobile payments with Aisle411.com COO Matthew Kulig, met the future of IT in the form of Washington University students, and found ourselves fascinated with Openly Disruptive, a collective that believes the future is "too important to leave to the professionals."

All photos by Kara Pritchard, owner of The Computer Room.

Will we see you at one of the next ReadWriteWeb meet-ups in one of 42 cities worldwide? Come on out!

There are several meetups planned already in North America. Here are a few that caught our attention.

St. Louis is hosting another killer ReadWriteWeb meetup. Their location is the Drunken Fish CWE. Let us know if you are planning on attending to see Joe Brockmeier, David Strom, Alicia Eler and Scott Fulton in person. More on the St. Louis Meetup.

Boston's meetup is meeting at Meadhall and will host startup founders, PR folks, entrepreneurs and students, among others. ReadWriteWeb writers Dan Rowinski and John Paul Titlow will be on hand to impress. RSVP on the Boston Meetup page. Read more on the Boston Meetup.

Located near DC? Then you can't miss the Vienna meetup, held at the Dolly Madison Library. Be sure to corner ReadWriteWeb webmaster extraordinaire, Jared Smith, for his opinions on the weather (not kidding).

In Montreal the Meetup will be held at 4020 St-Ambroise, suite 147. RSVP here.

Other meetups of note in North America include Chicago at Thai Spoon on Harrison and Wabash, Cleveland at Bier Market and Framingham, MA at 492 Old Conneticut Path.

Other North American Meetups:

Winnipeg - Canada
Ottawa - Canada
Brooklyn
New York
Austin, TX
Blue Springs, MO
Chesterfield, MO
Chapel Hill, NC
Indianapolis, IN
Irvine, CA
San Francisco, GA
Palo Alto, CA
Orange, CA
Seattle, WA
Albuquerque, NM
Towson, MD

The meetup in Seoul will be held at Shakr Media HQ and is going to be held at 7:30pm. More information on the location can be found on the Seoul Meetup page.

Free parking is available, but you'll need to send your license plate and car make/model in advance. Make sure to RSVP so you can be put in touch with the organizers.

Any questions about any meetups? Reach out to our Community Manager at robyn at readwriteweb.com.

Want to attend a ReadWriteWeb Meetup in your community? Check out the list below and if you don't see your city, add it soon. All meetups, unless otherwise noted, will be held on November 15, 2011 at 6:30pm.

We will be meeting at Meadhall, in the shadow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology right across the Charles River from Boston in Cambridge next Tuesday, Nov. 15 at 6:30 p.m. We are trying to make the ReadWriteWeb Boston meetup the biggest of them all, so come on out and say hello. Libations are sure to flow.

We have the upstairs of Meadhall reserved and it will be cash bar with a bartender and a couple of servers wandering around to take our orders. Meadhall is known for its great beer selection and good eats so make sure to stop by for a fine brewed delicacy and informed discussion on the future of technology.

I and our other East Coast ReadWriteWeb denizen, John Paul Titlow, will be in attendace. John is making the trip up for Philly, so do not make his efforts go to waste. If you are coming or want to take part in any of the festivities, use the Twitter hashtag #RWWMeetup. Hope to see you there.

If you are not in Boston, there are a bunch of other great place holding RWW Meetups next Tuesday. Check out the map below.

You can sign up at the official RWW Meetup page or, since I know all of you Boston folks like it so much, the Eventbrite page as well. No need to print the ticket, just come on out and say hello. Bring a friend. See you next week.

There are almost two dozen meetups already set up and there's still plenty of time to get one of your own local meetups ready. Take a look at the list below to see if there are already local meetups happening in your area. If not, check out the ReadWriteWeb Meetup page and start one of our own with just one click.

St. Louis, MO USA

Cambridge, MA USA

Vienna, VA USA

Portland, OR USA

Auckland, New Zealand

Seoul, Korea

Vladivostok, Russia

Wellington, New Zealand

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Tokyo, Japan

Seattle, WA USA

Savannah, GA USA

San Francisco, CA USA

Palo Alto, CA USA

Ottaway, Canada

Orange, CA USA

London, United Kingdom

Idianapolis, IN USA

Dublin, Ireland

Chicago, IL USA

Bristol, United Kingdom

Austin, TX USA

If your city isn't yet listed, be sure to claim it here.

Photo: Marshall Kirkpatrick, VP Content Development and Lead Writer, and Richard MacManus, Founder and Editor-in-Chief

Last week we had our first official ReadWriteWeb meetup at the Green Dragon in Portland, OR. Why Portland? Well, for starters, it's got the highest concentration of ReadWriteWeb staff, but also because Portland is a great city, with one of the most active tech scenes out there. The meetup was great, with just the right mix of people, conversations and beer.

But not everyone can get to Portland to talk tech, so we wanted to make sure we gave you all a venue to do just that in your own area.

ReadWriteWeb Meetup Everywhere

On November 15, tech enthusiasts, like yourself, will be gathering at their own local watering hole to opine on some of your favorite topics. Discuss the real-time Web, argue over which mobile OS will dominate in 2012, contemplate the implications of identity on social networks... The possibilities for a good tech-centric conversation in your area just got a great deal more likely.

We're already seeing some communities start to take shape in a few cities, including Washington DC, Amsterdam and St. Louis, MO. If your city isn't yet listed, be sure to claim it here.

Our inaugural meetup will be held in the city with the highest concentration of ReadWriteWeb writers, Portland, Oregon, on October 13 at the Green Dragon. Richard MacManus, our esteemed Founder and Editor in Chief, will even be there, all the way from New Zealand, so if you're in the area, please do stop in and say hello. Click here to RSVP, we'd love to see you there!

Please bring your cameras because we'll be posting the pics from the event to the ReadWriteWeb Facebook page and a few will go out via our Twitter account (@RWW).

Can't make it to Portland? Join us for our first Worldwide ReadWriteWeb Meetup Day (say that fast 5 times) on November 15, 2011. Just search for your city and join your local ReadWriteWeb meetup group. Suggest a location and meetup!

There are already a number of meetups set for November 10 in cities around the world, including Savannah, GA; Cambridge, MA, St. Louis, MO and Wellington, New Zealand.

Last week, we wrote about the virtual user rebellion over at social organization site Meetup. The site had unleashed a drastic redesign that many users said they never saw coming and these selfsame users came out in droves to complain in the site's feedback forum. In less than 24 hours, nearly 4,000 users came out to vote that the site "give organizers the ability to restore the old format."

While the company hasn't completely rolled back the redesign, it has come out with a blog post explaining the changes, apologizing and vowing to fix them.

CTO Greg Whalin addresses this idea directly, saying that "We in no way set out to indicate that we are devaluing Organizers. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. [...] I completely recognize that in some cases, we made mistakes that may have made it feel like this wasn't the case. For that I apologize."

According to Whalin, the site has already rolled back a number of changes over recent days. Some, he makes frank admissions about, saying that the change should never have been made. "These should never have been removed, and honestly, it was a bit of an oversight that they disappeared," Whalin writes in regards to user roles and titles on the RSVP list.

For the full list of changes, you can read Whalin's post, but we wonder - will they be enough? Can you really fault a company if they listen to user feedback and respond?

Whenever a company makes a big change to its layout, there are likely to be some complaints. You can't make everybody happy all the time, right?

Well, social organization site Meetup plopped down a redesign that it's calling "New Meetup" and its users have come out in droves to ask for the "Old Meetup" back.

From the description of the new Meetup site, it sounds like the changes are geared at allowing more cooperation and coordination when creating events, rather than relying on a single organizer to dictate when, where and how the event will take place. "If the leadership team for the Meetup Group would rather plan all the Meetups," the company writes, "Organizers may choose to disable Meetups 'in the making' under Group settings."

A site administrator has commented on the much-supported user request and said that it is "Unlikely we will flat out revert or offer multiple views, but keeping this open to hear how the new meetup is not working."

Users have responded in the comments saying that they will stop paying for the service, with some even taking their plea to Facebook, where they've created a group to petition Facebook to enable features similar to the ones they lost.

Surely, though, there are some users that are happy with the redesign, right? Are you a Meetup.com user and pleased with how things turned out? Let us know in the comments.

On the site, members can view the Community Board, which features listings for various types of activities, like Music, Art, Theater, Movies, Tours, etc. The listings can be filtered by Country, State, and City. There is also a Groups section, which features smaller communities that are open to all and organized around a specific activity or setting more like something Meetup.com would offer - for example, "Ann Arbor Sci-Fi Movies," "Chicago LunchTime Knit Group," or the "Boston Activity Group."

The difference between WhyGoSolo and sites like Meetup.com is that WhyGoSolo does not want to specifically focus on large groups, but more on one-on-one to small group interactions.

A better comparison of WhyGoSolo would be to sites like wannago.com and soon-to-launch zoodango.com. However, unlike those offerings, the WhyGoSolo community isn't meant to be an endpoint for social interactions. Instead, they want to grow into a hub of information that is gathered and then rebroadcast through various means, including social network integration. They already have the WhyGoSolo Facebook application which can be added to your profile to let your Facebook friends know when and what you are interested in doing. There is also a promise of twitter integration, website widgets, a mobile platform, and discounted ticket purchasing in the future.

The site offers different privacy levels: public, friends, or users (members) only. The public status allows everyone who visits WhyGoSolo.com and starts browsing to see your profile, listings and related information. Users Only means that only members of WhyGoSolo can see that info and the friends only setting allows only your friends see it.

Since the site is currently in alpha, it's too early to judge them just yet, but with all of their plans for future offerings, WhyGoSolo is one to keep your eye on.

"Paul and his zealous online supporters offer a case study on how, by leveraging Meetup.com, online activism can be harnessed into offline action," writes Compete's Matt Pace, pointing to the 82,000 Meetup members in Paul's camp who have held nearly 21,000 offline meetings. But how much of that is planned or even officially sanctioned by the Paul campaign?

The second largest Paul group on Meetup, the "Greater NYC Ron Paul Action Group Manhattan+," has a link to the NY4Paul.com site, which is unaffiliated with the Ron Paul campaign. In 2004, when Howard Dean became the poster boy for netroots politics by utilizing the same site (Meetup), it was mainly an accident. The New York Times wrote recently, "Dean’s campaign didn’t explode online because he somehow figured out a way to channel online politics; he managed this feat because his campaign, almost by accident, became channeled by people he had never met." The same thing seems to be happening with Ron Paul now.

Of course, that is the very definition of grassroots. But what it points to is this: these things can't be planned. Ron Paul's grassroots support network grew up by itself, not likely because Paul himself planned it. When Paul raised $4 million on Guy Fawkes Day, it was via a fundraising effort that his campaign had nothing to do with. So, Meetup is less of a secret campaign weapon than is a zealous grassroots support group (the former only works if you already have the latter), but that sort of thing is impossible to plan.

The Compete numbers do tell us a couple of other things, though. According to TechPresident, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton still have by far the most Facebook and MySpace supporters, but the FaceTime stats suggest that perhaps Ron Paul is engaging his supporters via the Internet better than his opponents. What the metric doesn't tell us is how many people are watching Paul, just how much they're watching. TechPresident points out that Paul's recent record $6 million single day fundraising haul was made possible by contributions of just 58,000 people (or about .0001933% of the country) -- so it certainly possible that he is engaging his supporters more than his opponents, but that the total number of supporters still numbers far fewer.

That could be why Paul's incredible online support has so far not translated into success in traditional polls of likely voters, where he generally does not make much of an impression (Paul averages just 5% across national Republican polls).

In August, we wondered why there was such a disconnect between online popularity and poll numbers in a post called The Web 2.0 Election: Does the Internet Matter in Election Politics?. We suggested three reasons, including demographics, "cool factor," and that the traditional polling methods themselves were screwed up. But I think perhaps the best possible cause of the disconnect came from one of our commenters.

"There's a possible fourth reason for the disconnect - the internet is international. US politics has worldwide implications and so non-US citizens and even non-US residents care about the US election, watch candidate videos on YouTube and befriend them on social networks. However, they don't vote," wrote Elad.

Outside of the US, where anti-war sentiment is often much stronger, it seems likely that onlookers would be attracted to the more staunchly anti-war candidates (like Paul on the Republican side, and Obama or Kucinich on the Democratic side). Further, Paul and Obama are also likely seen as the most anti-establishment candidates (due to Paul's Libertarian views, which contrast sharply with those of his fellow Republicans, and the perception that Obama is a Washington outsider because of the short time he has been in the Senate). I wonder how many of Paul's 5.8 million YouTube views come from outside the US?