The debut WordCamp Denver commenced this weekend at 9:00 AM Saturday morning, and neither the chill nor the hour stopped nearly three hundred participants from gathering at the Denver Art Museum to hear a line-up of exceptional speakers. WordCamp, a conference created for enthusiasts of the open source WordPress blog platform, was first hosted in San Francisco in 2006 and now annually deploys in forty cities worldwide.
Morning Session
WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg launched the conference with his “State of the Word” address. Much of Mullenweg’s enthusiasm comes from the success WordPress has achieved as an entirely Open Source Program, giving anyone access to see and modify the code. Along with pride in the crispness of the program overcoming the stereotype that “open source is supposed to be ugly,” Mullenweg is perhaps most excited about the WordPress community. This community contributes to the core product development and has created over 4,000 plug-ins, allowing each blogger to truly customize his WordPress installation. WordPress is increasingly becoming a more social and connected program with add-ons such as Intense Debate for commenting, BuddyPress (more on this later), and Prologue (“Twitter in a box”). Mullenweg also offered a brief preview into the next release of WordPress (2.8) which will include a theme browser and improved speed: “It will start to snap again.”
A graphic design panel (Jeremy Harrington of CrawlSpace, Kevin Menzie of Slice of Lime, and Brian Warren of Be Good Not Bad) followed Mullenweg’s opening. Key among the designers’ beliefs was the increasing need to ensure access to a site regardless of browser or device (e.g. iPhone) used. While accessibility must exist, a site need not look exactly the same in all cases, or as effectively communicated by Warren, pages should offer “visual treats for good and proper browsers as long as it degrades nicely” on other browsers (that means you IE6 users). Menzie emphasized that professional site design should provide the customer everything required to “customize content..on the fly,” without the repeated return trips to the design shop.
Jane Wells of Automattic focused on the Open Source community and ways to contribute to the development and enhancement of WordPress. While there are many ways for those well-versed in PHP coding to get involved (core.trac.wordpress.org), the WordPress team is seeking to create similar avenues for non-coders – including graphic design and user accessibility testing.
Ben Huh of Icanhascheezburger concluded the morning session without showing any captioned pictures of cats. Huh offered thoughts on business scaling – a subject in which his company has some experience (the site had 5.2M hits last Friday). Huh believes in “the Mr. Potato Head” philosophy – components should be added in a way that if one is lost “it will be ugly but no one dies.” Huh’s business has focused on outsourcing what can be done cheaply to allow his team 90% of its time to focus on their core business.
Afternoon “Technical Track”
The afternoon’s technical sessions kicked of with Crowd Favorite’s Alex King introducing his company’s Carrington theme. What Carrington provides is templates where previously conditional code would be required for posts, pages, and comments – a setup designed to be more accessible to designers. For example, if a blog wanted posts by different authors to use different formatting, they could create two different templates rather than having to write if-else statements. Crowd Favorite just released Carrington JAM which is free of all mark-up, enabling designers to start with a clean slate.
King then moderated a panel discussion on Open Source Licensing featuring Mullenweg, Joe Hillebrand (former CTO of Jabber) and Stephen O’Grady (industry analyst with RedMonk). While the discussion ranged in the technicalities of particular licenses at time (e.g. GPL versus Apache), the panel kept returning to the core question of how one can make money when giving away the code for free. Among the options proposed were selling services and support and dual licensing (GPL and paid commercial).
Shawn Parker of Crowd Favorite attempted to demystify plugins through building a simple one (which creates special formatting for featured posts and generates a list of these posts) before the audience’s eyes. WordPress makes it easy to create new functionality by offering many hooks – essentially places to access the code. These hooks can either be actions (things WordPress does) or filter (information WordPress gathers). For those interested, Parker has promised to make the code of the plugin available online.
Jake Spurlock, founder of Petomundo, provided an overview of BuddyPress – WordPress’ answer to Facebook. While the program is similar to Facebook in functionality (profiles, friends, groups, newsfeed), it is entirely open source as opposed to Facebook’s “walled garden” approach. BuddyPress currently runs on WordPressMU (multiple user) which enables the administrator to allow each user to have a blog, but a version for regular WordPress (sans individual blogs) is coming soon.
Joseph Scott concluded the afternoon “Technical Track” covering WordPress APIs. Scott spent some time contrasting XML-RPC and AtomPub. He then went on to present some future opportunities he sees for ways bloggers will be able to communicate with their blogs outside of the WordPress admin panel (comment moderation from the iPhone app is coming in version 1.2). Among the more interesting is OAuth, which would enable bloggers to add content from other programs (e.g. flickr) to their blogs without having to give their WordPress credentials to the outside program.
Afternoon “Blogger Track”
The afternoon “Blogger Track” began with Josh Pigford (TheAppleBlog) and Jim Turner (One by One Media) discussing “Blogging as a Business.” Pigford, who sold his business to Gigaom in September of 2008, offered grounded advice for those seeking to scale a blog as a business. He believes that the quantity of posts published often comes at the expense of post quality, a tradeoff to be avoided. He sees as critical the “loyalty metric,” or a blog’s repeat audience, which can often be measured by the number of comments proffered by the readership. He also recommended that critical comments should be handled gracefully by the administrator, as snarky controversy might drive some temporary traffic but ultimately dampens community building. Overall, Pigford believes that, “People [readers] want something that informs them, and that they somehow come away equipped.” Turner, who is in the business of connecting professional bloggers with corporate America, offered that the return on investment of business blog is “very, very hard to quantify,” yet still increasingly sought by big business. For those seeking to increase their own traffic, Turner offered: “Use your blog as a tool, but also use other tools to promote the blog,” by way of a robust online presence.
Gil Asakawa (MediaNews) began his comments by asserting that bloggers achieved a milestone in respectability in the 2008 Presidential campaign, but then proceeded to reinforce throughout the rest of his presentation that “blogs don’t get respect” from professionally trained journalists. Asakawa, who gained considerable experience by launching the blog for the Denver Post, believes the media simply “don’t know how [blogging] works, and are scared by it.”
Jon Fox (Intense Debate) spoke next, revealing his ideas for revolutionizing blog post commenting by creating a cloud-based repository of all user comments, indexed and searchable across all blogs. Fox believes that comments are currently undervalued by administrators, when in fact they exist as the “primary source of feedback” for a site, “the only dynamic part of a post,” “free content,” and “the primary means of community development.” Yet comments are ignored by search engines and ultimately lost in the black hole of archived material. Intense Debate, which was purchased last year by Automattic (owner of WordPress), plans to address the importance of comments by creating a repository and offering users the chance to create searchable profiles, with their comments indexed and attached to their online identity. This would allow other readers to track them across multiple blogs.
Dave Moyer (Bitwire Media) then gave a talk on adding podcasts to WordPress, discussing the pros and cons of the various podcasting plugins. Moyer, founder of Bitwire Media and blogger for Ars Technica, then proceeded to offer advice on a podcaster’s page design, emphasizing tips such as preparing hyperlinked show notes to go along with each broadcast, as well as leaving ample room for ads and audience feedback.
Micah Baldwin (Lijit) closed the afternoon with a hugely popular presentation entitled, “Online Influence: Making Noise without Being Noisy.” Baldwin began by deconstructing influence into the component parts of “trust, expertise, and brand,” with each pivoting on the notion of creating and delivering on expectation. A blogger begins by building a brand (setting expectation), proceeds to generate trust (delivering on expectation), and is eventually named an expert by a third party (others linking their brand and trust to the expectation of one’s delivery of expertise). Baldwin believes that such online authenticity – which should be centered primarily in a blog – requires actionable steps on the part of a potential influencer, including becoming involved online, being consistently active online, and eventually becoming a conduit to point one’s audience towards other examples of excellence. Baldwin, who is considered quite forthright when posting on his ample experience, offered “failure is not and ending, but a process” of learning, and knowing this he is no longer afraid to present his true self. And with that in mind, the day closed on the debut WordCamp Denver.
