WordCamp Vancouver

Yesterday I attended the innaugural WordCamp Vancouver presented by Tazzu at the Network Hub.

The format was not unlike a BarCamp where people could submit topics they would present on. Unfortunately I was laying on a beach in Hawaii when it all happened (the advance submissions that is) so I missed the opportunity to participate as a presenter. Fortunately the plan is to have these frequently so there should be more chances to participate. Judging from the turnout, it could have possibly been a day long affair as there was no shortage of interesting topics and people interested in learning more about WordPress.

As much as I like the Network Hub, it’s not the best kind of venue for this kind of event - it’s just not big enough to accomodate the number of people that were interested in attending. There wasn’t nearly enough chairs for everyone and it was pretty tropical in there once people started showing up. There must be some place in Vancouver that can fit a large number of people, has decent wifi and supports some kind of food/drink service. Aside from UBC, SFU or one of the other school venues, there isn’t much that works.

I won’t recap the whole event because as she usually does, Rebecca liveblogged the entire event - well almost all of it since she was also a presentor, Raul covered for her during her segment.

The one presentor that I was surprised by was John Chow. He gave a presentation on making money from your blog. I had heard some (negative) stories about him and was expecting some kind of slimy, Tom Vu-like salesman and was impressed with his openness about how he became successful from blogging. He outlined how much money he makes from his blog, detailed the pricing structures and many key mistakes people make when trying to monitize their sites. His candor and self-deprecating humour was refreshing.

While I don’t necessarily agree with some of the tactics he uses, I don’t see them being much different than what you would see people in other types of business do to be successful - figure out the system and exploit it. I’m also not sure that his approach would work for many bloggers I know but he certainly has an interesting story and I thought he told it well. The audience was certainly hanging on his every word although some folks were definitely not impressed by his methods.

As with many of the local tech events, the evening wrapped up in a local restaurant for drinks with some old and new friends.

I’m looking forward to the next WordCamp for sure. You can see some of the other pictures I took in my WordCamp Flickr set.

Northern Voice Keynote Speaker announced

Tickets are almost sold out to this year’s Northern Voice conference. It was just announced that Matt Mullenweg, creator of the Wordpress system that I use to power this site, will be giving the keynote at the conference…although there hasn’t been a post about Matt on the conference site, he blogged about it on his so it must be true.

I’ve had the chance to see Matt speak twice now: at SXSW last year and at WordCamp last summer. Like Larry Lessig, he knows how to give a great presentation. He also happens to have one of the coolest personal domain names : http://ma.tt although it sounds like it was a bit of an ordeal to acquire. Someone beat me to the one I should have gotten.

This year’s conference is shaping up to be a great one! See you at the Waldorf for the opening party!

WordCamp 2007 Recap

While vacationing in Sunnyvale last week, I took some time out to attend WordCamp 2007 in downtown San Francisco. It was about the only thing I had planned to do while down there as I mostly just wanted to hang out with my friend Jason who recently started working at my personal mecca, Apple. The rest of my time was seemingly spent roaming around the Apple campus in Mac-geek heaven…but that’ll be another post.

Charles over at Bloggingpro.com has one of the best recaps of Day 2 of WordCamp (the day I attended) I’ve seen so I thought I’d share it. I’m always amazed when people can take notes with this level of detail while attending a conference….I certainly can’t unless I videotape it or something. Matt Mullenweg also mentioned that another great resource for notes from the event is the in the trackbacks on each session in the schedule as each one is a separate post.

While I found all the events of the day interesting and useful, here are a few of my highlights as Charles and others have covered everything very well already:

• Barry and Matt talking about HyperDB and High Performance WordPress - install WP-Cache even if you don’t think you’ll need it - this prepares the system for seemingly infinite scalability and as Charles wrote in his post, the benefits equal something in the realm of being able to handle 25 million pageviews per day - all on an untuned (off the shelf) server setup



• the efforts currently underway by Happy Cog shows that WordPress (Automattic) is serious about improving itself and is willing to spend the necessary time and effort to really take it to the next level. A number of the screens that were shown during Liz Danzico’s presentation on WP Usability were very impressive and addressed a number of long standing ‘wishlist’ items for me as a WP user.
• Matt’s State of the Word talk was also very interesting. There’s nothing better than hearing what’s going on in something you use all the time directly from the source. Plus Matt’s presentation style is entertaining and inspiring
• the BBQ lunch from Memphis Minnies was great…reminded me of the great bbq I had in Austin at SXSW.
• I wish the event was longer as one day (4-5 hours really) just isn’t long enough to get deep into some of the developer topics. This may have been better if I was in San Francisco longer as there were a number of events and gatherings outside of the actual event that would have been fun and probably useful to attend

Not sure if I’ll be able to make it next year but if the planets align, I’d definitely like to go again.

Check out all my photos from WordCamp 2007 - many taken with my iPhone and uploaded to Flickr during the event which I guess sort of makes me a live blogger like Rebecca.

WordCamp 2007

I’m heading to San Francisco tomorrow to spend an extra long weekend with a good friend, check out his new office at Apple, and attend WordCamp which is a two day conference to WordPress users and developers.

I’m most likely only going to attend the developer day as many of the topics on the other day I’ve already seen covered at SXSW or other conferences I’ve attended lately. Plus I want to be a tourist too while I’m down there….and of course visit a Fry’s or three.

Should be a fun week ahead and I’ll be taking a ton of pictures.