JTony.Com

Well, I chose to skip the party this evening, as my head was still pounding and I was feeling awkward trying to be social. Hard to meet new people and be scintillating when you’re trying not to vomit from pain. So, I rode Muni home and took a brief nap.

The headache is gone now, finally! That means I might actually sleep tonight, so I’m heading to bed very shortly. Beforehand I thought I’d write my last impressions of the day:

I arrived a few minutes late to the Widgets showcase, and the guy from RawSugar was talking when I sat down. I didn’t know much about widgets yet, but figured it out pretty quickly and was pleased with what I saw (I’m sure I’ll be looking more carefully at and probably installing some soon).

The session did sort of set the tone for the presentations, which at times was problematic. The whole BarCamp scenario requires a great amount of audience participation, but in a “showcase” style presentation it is up to the presenters to pick up the slack if the audience doesn’t have a great deal to share. Andy Skelton did a great job, but I wish he’d shown more cool things that have already been done with widgets. He did provide a great understanding of how they work, though, and I learned a lot! Andy was wearing a “Code is Poetry” t-shirt. I wrote in my notes, “Code is not poetry, but it is just as elegant.”
The second session I attended was Prince Campbell‘s talk on writing and promoting compelling blogs. He’s a very relaxed, very compelling speaker, and he digs right into the audience to get them talking. The audience was a little slow to warm up, but Prince kept at it and soon the discussion got more lively. I really liked several of his points, especially, “to make a blog compelling, make it about THEM, not about YOU.” Very well said, indeed, Prince!

The musical interlude with Eric Haller came next, and I rocked out!

Then Matt gave the State of the Word. I’d never met Matt before, but I sure enjoyed listening to him talk. What I love about him is how open he is to anything offered up. I spoke with him after the event, briefly, to introduce myself, and was flattered to find that he’d read my posts from the day. Matt, I’ll probably be getting in touch with you soon to talk about how maybe I could help.

Next was lunch, and I did some socializing with those sitting around me, in particular a scientist named Robin and another blogger named Ron Lamb. Ron and I chatted at several points during the day, and I’m looking forward to reading his posts. The food, from Memphis Minnie’s was as tasty as i’d hoped, but I was careful not to over-indulge (and was later very happy I hadn’t).

The Monitize your Blog session put on by Yobie Benjamin and Pat McCarthy was great. I’ve been avoiding even the thought of adding ads to my blog to make money, but there were other ideas as well, including some ways to include advertising only for certain visitors (for instance, visitors coming directly from search engines only, so that the ads are not presented to your regular readers). Better was Yobie’s work with Goodstorm.com, a sales program that I really think I could get behind. Would anyone out there be offended if I offered up stuff I really liked and recommended via a portion of my sidebar?

The next session on using WordPress as a CMS was very helpful. Mark Jaquith really showed some of the ways that WordPress is set up to do a great deal more than Blogging. I’ve been wanting to put up my portfolio again for a while, and now I know exactly how I’ll do it (I sort of knew before, but hadn’t gotten around to fishing out the details, and this session really helped me nail that down).

I already wrote of Andy’s rocking out, and I briefly discussed Om Malik’s talk about Jornalism vs. Blogging. It was not clear to me exactly what he was trying to get across, except that, if Bloggers are going to be taken seriously as journalists they have to follow the same rules of legwork and research that journalists follow. Unfortunately, I don’t take most journalists seriously as journalists for precisely this reason, and I find that Bloggers tend to spend more time an energy over all thinking and talking through things enough that it is often even better researched than the extra phone call or two that a typical traditional media journalist does to “fact check.” I also think that the brevety that has been forced down our throats in little sound bite chunks has hurt blogging’s potential as a deeper medium for journalism. People are so used to the brevety, they’ve come to expect it from all media. The only way to give them an apetite for something deeper is to give them something both compelling and deep. If it compelling, they’ll hapilly swallow the depth and learn to expect more from their media.

I also already spoke about the SEO presentation by Neil Patel and another guy who, unfortunately, is not named in the schedule. It wasn’t really their fault completely. One problem with this kind of conference is that the experience of the audience is so mixed. I know some people got a great deal out of the discussion, but I wasn’t learning much at all. I have to admit that it may have been due in part to my head feeling like someone wouldn’t stop hitting me with a hammer. hard. with the claw side.

The Plug-in showcase was a good way to round it off. Niall Kennedy did a good job of going over some of the basics, and a couple of folks showed off some neat plug-ins. I wish that Niall had gone deeper in and shown us some of the really cool plug-ins I know are out there. With the plug-ins, WordPress really extends into something perfectly customizable without sacrificing the ability to keep the core code standard, and I’d have liked to see more of that potential shown off in the session. I wanted to be “wow”ed. I learned stuff, though, and look forward to putting it into practice.

And that was basically it. I spoke briefly to Kevin Burton who I always used to see at the Canvas Cafe, but had never spoken to, back when I was using it as my “illustration studio.” I also spoke briefly with Matt, as I said before, and even more briefly with Lisa Hightower but by that time was feeling rather woozy and new it was time to make my exit.

All in all a terrific day, with so much that learned, so much to think about and digest, and so much to work on for the future! I’m usually not one for dringing the software cool-aid, but I have to say that hooking in a little more closely with the community of folks using WordPress is definitely a good thing.

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