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WordCamp Dallas 2008 Observations Part 1

A couple weekends back, I went to a gathering referred to as WordCamp here in the Dallas Area. It’s called WordCamp Dallas but it was held in Frisco,Texas which is an affluent community North of Dallas. What is WordCamp you say? It’s a gathering of WordPress bloggers, podcasters, programmers,etc. In case you didn’t know, I use WordPress to power my site so I thought this would be a great opportunity to learn more about what I use almost everyday. I learned a lot more than I expected!

WordPress 2.5

Presenter: Matt Mullenweg

The gathering started with an announcement by Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, about WordPress 2.5 which was released that day to the web for everyone to download and try out. The new version is a massive overhaul for the look and feel of the software. I thought great, I just bought the WordPress for Dummies book, now all the screenshots are useless.

45 ways to Power Up your Blog

Presenter: John Pozadzides
Blog: One Man’s Blog

This lecture was probably the most insightful speech and made the $20 for the event well worth it. I am not going to tell you everything John had to say because I linked to his blog above but here are the high points I didn’t think about:

• Use english names for images instead of names like image001.jpg
• Use ALT and Title text for images as well. This will help in finding these images come up more in searches.
• Host your own images. If you link to Flickr or others you are just giving your traffic away.
• The rule of sticking to one topic is a myth. Instead, write about what you know and love … all of it.
• Email Subscriptions. Not everyone uses RSS and even the ones that do don’t have read everyone they subscribe to. (This is one I just started doing. We will see how well it works).
• The appropriate length of a blog is 3-4 paragraphs or 1-2 pages of content.

John also showed off an amazing piece of software called Woopra. This software is a real-time stats program for your website to track the number of visitors who go to your site as well as other neat functions. He demonstrated this using his blog site and how many visitors were currently looking at his site and of course the number went up by those in the audience viewing the site. Another sweet feature was the ability to directly chat with those visiting his site. I know this sounds scary but as John states he can only direct chat with people who have logged in to his site before or have left a comment. Besides, he says, you can ignore the chat request. The website is closed beta so all those that attended received a beta invite! Check out GeekBrief’s video interview with John.

After his talk I was able to talk to John about some other advice relating to my blog and he was very helpful. This seemed to be the best part of the conference, you can approach anybody there for advice or just chat and people were more than happy to help.

How to Prevent, Detect, and Stop Content Theft

Presenter: Johnathan Bailey
Blog: Plagiarism Today

This is a topic I didn’t really think much about until WordCamp. It makes sense since you put all that effort into writing your blog, then someone strips that information and puts it on their own website and passes it off like it’s theirs. Jonathan does give you some good advice which doesn’t take much time and effort. Here is just a few:

• Add a copyright notice to the bottom of your site.
• Apply for a creative commons license.
• Self-Linking: cross link to your site within your post.
• Watermark your images.

Cali Lewis and Neal Campbell

Website: GeekBrief.TV

These two are the celebrities of the group. GeekBrief.TV is a wildly popular video podcast on the internet where Cali Lewis dishes up the latest tech news from gadgets to software. They were there to talk about how they use WordPress on their 7 public sites, along with their latest endeavor which is called The Big Trip. This is where Cali and Neal plan to take their show cross-country to 50 states in 50 weeks. On their big trip site, they are funding the project by advertising by pixels.  The website PaidbyPixels is where you go to pay for advertising space on the page by so many pixels. It’s a really neat idea.

They also spoke about their humble beginnings back in Christmas of 2005 with nothing more than a dream and a desire to be one of the first Video Podcasters. Neal also showed off their Nokia N95 cellphone which is capable of streaming live video to the net via a service called qik. I was also lucky enough to get a signed autograph from both of them (I will post them on flickr soon).

Stay tuned for Part 2 of my observations at WordCamp Dallas 2008.

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