WordCamp 2008
August 23, 2008 – 10:24 am
This past weekend I was fortunate enough to attend WordCamp 2008. The event was hosted at the University of San Francisco Mission Bay Campus and was just a perfect set up for such an event. There were roughly 450 attendees and 16 well respected presenters. There were two separate tracks for the event; one for the users and one for the developers. I remained in the user track for the entire event even though there were a few speakers in the developer track I wished I could have heard, so perhaps next time.
The schedule itself was fairly fast past and intense yet the flow managed to work well. Below were the topics and list of speakers I heard from.
• The Future of Education and Wordpress – Alan Levine
• SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make - Stephan Spencer
• Open Source Business Models - Stephen O’Grady
• Andy Skelton - A musical performance
• LOLcats and the Secret of Virality- Ben Huh
• Wordpress & Microformats: Past, Present, Future- Tantek Celik
• Switching to Wordpress Painlessly - Lloyd Budd
• 260 Ways to break Wordpress - Lorelle VanFossen
• Hassle-free Upgrades - Sam Bauers
• State of the Word - Matt Mullenweg
• Get Friendly with BuddyPress - Andy Peatling
• Democratizing the Web through Global Voices - Jeremy Clarke
• An interview with Om Malik
• Riding the Crazyhorse - Liz Danzico and Jane Wells
• A musical performance by Chuck Lewis aka SEO Rapper
• Kicking Ass and Creating Passionate Users - Kathy Sierra
Alan Levine kicked off the event speaking about the future of education and WordPress or primarily blogging and education. The most amazing part of his speech was really just hearing how intricately involved the internet is with our education system and that blogs are really becoming a very powerful tool for educators. Edublogs is just one of the sites referenced in which students and/or teachers can manage a blog for projects, curriculum and the likes. Edublog uses Wordpress multi user installations and has had thousands of sign up thus far, truly a promising response.
Stephan Spencer was impressive to hear as he discussed SEO Mistakes that Bloggers Make and ways to easily correct them. A few techniques he mentioned to help improve upon your rankings were to include tag clouds, tag pages, and tag conjunction pages. Stephan mentions that title tags are arguably the most important of the on-page factors for search engines. He developed a plugin to aid this process and optimize the title tags across your WordPress blog. You can read more and download the SEO Title Tag plugin that Stephan developed here.
Stephan O’Grady of Redmonk.com discussed how open source business models can bring in money and he described several methods in order to make them profitable. You can see his presentation here. Andy Skelton (who is much more than a musician) performed a few songs as well which really allowed for some nice downtime.
Ben Huh of LOLcats.com was by far the most entertaining as he included hilarious photos from a few of his comical sites to really make his topic on the Secret of Virality speak volumes. Once you see one of his sites (ex: LOLcats.com) you would know the type of Viral Marketing capable there. He described virality as people’s willingness to send content to another. Seeming pretty simple, however there are a few rules really that seem to come into play, which basically he described as “not being a dickâ€. Quality invitation virality is sticky and sustainable which is ultimately what you want versus spammy invites which at some point will only lead to failure.
Tantek Celik, an amazing gentleman whose knowledge really seems endless, spoke about WordPress and Microformats: Past, Present, and Future. Prior to his talk I have to say I was somewhat unfamiliar with the concept of microformats. His presentation gave quick light to the topic and understanding about how valuable being able to utilize and access semantic data is as most site now employ this type of open data format.
He referenced the hCard as an easy method in distributing and gaining contact information of users over the web. Using the hCard, with your contact information already stored, makes signing up for social networking sites, event sites, and more super simple. To learn more about the hCard or create your own hCard check out the hCard creator. In order to best utilize this system Tantek recommends installing Operator for firefox which leverages these microformats.
Lloyd Budd spoke about switching to WordPress painlessly which in all reality these days has been made very simple with several backup plugins along with a few simple redirect pieces to ensure nothing is lost including data, traffic, and comments. Lorelle VanFossen spoke about being able to push WordPress as far as it can go to ensure that it is the most sophisticated open blogging platform available. It was really refreshing to hear her speak with such a passion about doing more with WordPress, to push it and improve its platform among the different browsers, operating systems, and hosting companies. Sam Bauers spoke about hassle-free upgrades which again I feel has really been made simple with the automatic upgrade plugin. In less than 1 minute you can have the newest version of WordPress on your blog.
Matt Mullenweg who was gracious enough to give Search Feature an interview spoke on WordPress’ past and current state. He spoke about the large growth in members of the WordPress community for both .com and .org. He spoke about the number of releases in this past year (approximately one per month) and he spoke about the huge increase in downloads this year as compared to last year which all just proves how much WordPress really means to the community, to its members, and to businesses worldwide. For 2009 he mentioned how important upgrades will be and how the WordPress platform will continue to lead the way towards bigger, better, and stronger growth for those that use it.
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