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The State of the Word: WordCamp SF 2009

Last Saturday was the latest installation of WordCamp in San Francisco and it was majorly packed. Over 700 people were rumored to be in attendance and if you were there, it was pretty obvious that that number was well within the ballpark of what was expected.This had been my first time attending a WordCamp event although I have been using WordPress for the past several years and have grown fond of it. But in case you didn’t know, WordCamp is a great event organized by the fine folks at Automattic whose goal is to bring together the WordPress enthusiasts with those wishin to learn more about the power behind the blogging software and create a better community.

So what’s some of the takeaways from attending an event like WordCamp? Well you have a wide array of speakers. I know that during the most recent WordCamp in Baltimore (WordCamp Mid-Atlantic), the great organizers had Anil Dash from SixApart (a competitor to WordPress) give a keynote there that made it interesting to hear. At WordCamp SF, the speakers were just as great. The attendees were treated to great speeches by some of these speakers:

- Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week who spoke about scalable blogging.

- Matt Cutts from Google on how to use WordPress efficiently to increase your page rank.

- Tara Hunt, author of The Whuffie Factor who spoke about how to build social capital.

- Chris Pirillo, organizer of Gnomedex who spoke on building community.

- Scott Porad of I Can Has Cheezburger fame spoke about user-generated content.

- John Lilly from Mozilla on lessons learned.

Overall WordCamp was a real big success. There was a lot of hallway networking and the food was delicious – the Automattic team had brought in all-you-can-eat barbeque. And would you believe it, but the Wi-Fi connection at the venue we were at actually held up? You had no problems connecting to the Internet at all, but unfortunately there weren’t enough electrical outlets. However, that didn’t damper the enthusiasm of the crowd.

I attended most of the sessions and found them quite informative. While I did miss Tim Ferriss’s talk (I was volunteering at the registration table in the early morning), I did hear good things about it. The first session I did attend was from Matt Cutts and it spoke to me on leveraging the tools that are offered on WordPress and how to view tag and optimize your blog posts effectively. An interesting exercise that took place was when Matt took out what is commonly known as a “thumb drive”. We were to talk to our neighbor and see what they would call it & keywords like “jump drive”, “memory stick”, “USB drive”, etc – the point being that everyone labels things differently so you need to account for that when choosing your keywords. Just because you think it’s called a scientific term does not mean it’ll be the same for your audience. Take advantage of tags, categories, post titles and your permalinks when blogging.

Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress, was up next with his State of the Word where he talks about what’s up & coming with WordPress. He delved deep into the history of where WordPress has gone over the past six years (he was quick to point out that it was their sixth anniversary). A couple of things that he brought up was that while there’s an existing iPhone application that will let bloggers post via mobile device, there’s another update coming soon. But, not to let the Blackberry users feel left out, a blogging application will soon be released as well for those phones. But perhaps the biggest news from Mullenweg was that WordPressMU (multi-users) and WordPress.org were going to merge, thereby making it easier for people to handle their blogs.

After Mullenweg’s keynote & lunch, the sessions began again and Tara Hunt is on stage. Hunt is the author of the acclaimed book The Whuffie Factor and also is one of the owners of a popular co-working space in San Francisco, called Citizen Space. Her presentation was pretty much on how you can achieve your goals online but in order to do that, you need whuffie – this is basically social capital. You need to build up your “street cred” so to speak & there are five parts to having that whuffie:

1. listen and don’t interrupt,
2. be a part of the community,
3. create an amazing feeling,
4. embrace the chaos,
5. find a purpose

Her books is available now and I’ll be exploring how you can find whuffie in other posts.

There were a couple of sessions that I didn’t really enjoy and didn’t see how they related to blogging, but for the most part the rest of the program was outstanding.

Perhaps the biggest session that I thought was outstanding was Chris Pirillo’s talk on community. He understood how to build one and explained to the attendees that it wasn’t about having an artificial community, because those don’t exist. Rather, you are engaging your customers and nature and the societal culture will dictate whether a community is formed. You are in it for them not for yourself. A community is built on common interests and if you try to create one or even force it, you’ll never succeed. Let everything take its own course.

The end of WordCamp resulted in mass traffic jams out of the parking garage but I felt that everyone was pleasantly happy with what was presented. For me, I enjoyed the networking opportunities that were presented along with the information given by the speakers. If you think that you might go to one next time, then you should really think about it. For $25, everything I’ve mentioned to you above is included. So when you go back, you will have helpful insights, good resources, and have made more friends.

So sayeth WordCamp.

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