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This is the first year I did not attend WordCamp San Francisco, the annual event that is the largest of the WordCamp gathering. It seems like I’m missing the announcement of some big news.
Matt Mullenweg announced during his State of the Word speech, thaa going forward, WordPress and WordPress MU (Multi-user) would be merged. In [...]

It was a brilliant day on Saturday at University of Baltimore where Jimmy Gardner and I kicked off the inaugural WordCamp Mid-Atlantic. I have been to half a dozen or more WordCamps since the first one in San Francisco in July of 2006. Without being at all conceited, because it had nothing really to do [...]

WordCamp Mid-Atlantic is five days away (May 16) and things are beginning to fall into place. This is my first attempt at event organizing and I definitely have learned some tough lessons along the way. It’s also been tremendously helpful and rewarding for me. I’m looking forward to this thing coming in to land though.
Along [...]

Mark your calendars for May 16, 2009. This is the date for the first WordCamp Mid-Atlantic, a regional WordCamp organized for WordPress users in Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Philadelphia.

We have locked down the venue as University of Baltimore Thumel Business Center, which has also been the facility for a variety of other events – most notably, SocialDevCampEast. It is in proximity to major transportation hubs, including Amtrak.

On Saturday, I posted a review of my session at WordCamp on Search and Findability. It was hard to gauge at that time how effective the session was at the time I wrote that. Beside my normal annual attendance at WordCamp as a subject matter expert, and several sessions at different WordCamps around the country over the past few years, I was there on behalf of Lijit.

In fact, when I pitched the session on search to Matt (as a core interest of Lijit), I was firmly instructed (as I suspected I would be) that hard pitching the company was off limits. From my perspective as a member of the WordPress community, I wouldn’t have it any other way. It was the same approach that we took at b5media. The company was represented. The company was known as a WordPress shop. We shared war stories with other WordPress shops. But no one on stage at any point pitched b5. It’s non-standard, I think, for any company to pitch their wares at any *Camp.

I’m at WordCamp San Francisco 2008 today and had the distinct pleasure of giving a talk on Search and Findability. Distinct pleasure because it was the first session of the day at 9am. And if any of you know me, then you know that I don’t do mornings well. :-)

My session was about Search and Findability. There seemed to be a lot of misunderstandings about what the session would be about. Findability is not SEO. SEO is an aspect of Findability. SEO makes a blog findable for search engines.