Meetups

Cpod stopped supporting meetups quite a while ago. I suggest you do it on another platform and perhaps promote it in the comments section here. CPod also disabled private messaging among users quite a while ago too, which is another reason you will probably want to use a site like meetup.com, or the equivalent in China for those who live there. (Can't recall the name of it offhand. Meetup.com had been sporadically blocked in China in the past, although I had no problem with it last year. )

Podster, thanks for the info. I will check a site like Meetup.com, I heard a friend of mine talking about this site a couple weeks ago for an event he was planning.

It's strange that Cpod stopped supporting meetups when I saw that there was one in NYC not too long ago, there were pics on the Cpod official facebook page.

I will also try emailing Chinesepod support to see if I can get a more definitive answer.

Matt, Yes, I think you are correct that there was a gathering in New York, but I did not count that since they have a marketing presence in New York City anyway. The Shanghai office used to do meetups in Shanghai also, maybe as sort of a test of the concept. As far as I know the New York gathering was unrelated to the previous attempts by CPod to capitalize on social networks. You might try to contact Jillian Steward in New York who I believe organized it for CPod. (She used to answer question about the language and was still commenting as of early December). I was told by CPod directly that they ended their own "meetups" initiative. It seems you have a lot of Chinese speakers and learners in Calgary. However, I checked and there are not many groups of any kind hosted on meetup.com for Calgary. Still, I encourage you to take a "if you build it, they will come" approach. You might have to go the extra mile and put up a few flyers at the University or elsewhere to promote it. Although I have been to many meetups where many members were CPod subscribers, I can't say that we recruited new subscribers for CPod. If that experience is typical, it might be why they dropped the effort. In meetups that I host or co-host we continue to showcase CPod content. Maybe we sent them some business that I don't know about. I think my own discovery of CPod was via word of mouth from someone at a meetup.com organized gathering.

The Meetup option was removed a while ago like podster said since it was difficult to keep track of where and when events were happening, and who would be attending. I would highly recommend Meetup.com since they focus only on doing this, and from our first meetup, we found it very useful and amazingly easy to get a group going. You soon find that there are many people who share your same interests where ever you are. Perhaps when we have improved the current commenting system we will re-introduce the meetups groups, or better yet, intergrate it with meetup.com or other similar websites.

Thanks Gwilym for the update. It also appears that you guys have removed the Meetups option from the website now as I am no longer able to find it. This should reduce any future confusion :) I will go ahead with yours and Podsters recommendation and check out Meetup.com and see how it goes :)

I remembered the name of the Chinese site similar to meetup.com. It's Douban. CPod did a lesson on it.

http://chinesepod.com/lessons/activities-on-douban.

I don't know if they have many active users in North America. Maybe someone can give it a try and see.

Here is the site for the "Universirty (sic) of Calgary http://www.douban.com/group/UofC/.

And for Chinese in Calgary: http://www.douban.com/group/121406/

Thanks for the info Podster, I will check these out.