I made a point of making my event one that would set trends and challenge the status quo.

Mid-Atlantic

One thing I did think of early on was that I detested the trend that identified an event with a singular city, especially when there were multiple cities, all offering different, yet complementary modus operandi. I bucked the trend of identifying the event by a city, eschewing names like WordCamp DC or WordCamp Baltimore. These names, while celebratory of the city that hosts them, inherently bear the problem of inferred exclusivity.

From the very first WordCamp in the region, I challenged that designation and attempted to bring the cities together. It was called WordCamp Mid-Atlantic.

Three Cities, then Two

The original plan was to bring the three cities together in Baltimore for a WordPress event. Ideally, the result would be more collaboration and resources shared between the various communities. Ultimately, Philadelphia never bought into Mid-Atlantic (and in fact, ended up with their own successful WordCamp Philly). However, Mid-Atlantic was wildly supported by both Baltimore and DC. even garnering coverage in the Baltimore Sun business publication Maryland Daily Record.

For WordCamp Mid-Atlantic 2010, the event was geared mainly to the Washington Metro and Baltimore.

Keynotes That Challenge

In both events, I wanted to bring in someone from the WordPress leadership hierarchy as a Keynote as well as someone from outside of WordPress entirely to challenge the gathered attendees. This as quite controversial, actually. In 2009, I brought in Anil Dash, founder and former SVP at SixApart. Anil was known historically as somewhat of an antagonist, but did a wonderful job in sharing and illustrating the similarities between WordPress and SixApart who provided a competing platform. His message was one of learning from each other.

This past year, I opted to bring in Marco Tabini who has also been a frequent antagonist of WordPress. His message was one from the perspective of the PHP community and reconciling how the PHP core people could learn and help the WordPress core people, and vica versa. My inbox became a little tense in the weeks leading up to the event due to other incidents involving dissenting views about the GPL license and WordPress’ interpretation of it. Needless to say, Marco did an amazing job.

It’s Not My Baby

As most of you know, I have left the Baltimore/Washington region. As a result, this past WordCamp Mid-Atlantic was my last. People have asked me quite a lot about who I would pass the baton to. This is a tricky question because the event is not mine. It’s yours.

That said, this is not for just anyone to run. I cannot put any strings on who will run the next event but I do have the platform to voice my sentiments:

• I want to see Mid-Atlantic stay in the event. I do not want to see a fractured event where there becomes a WordCamp Baltimore and a WordCamp DC. Both cities have user groups that meet frequently. I want to see the WordCamp Mid-Atlantic event retain it’s place as a regional/local event.
• I want to see the idea of challenging (and even dissenting) opinions welcomed to the stage, like Marco… and Anil. We should not be scared of being shaken up. We should embrace it and learn from it. That said, future organizers should be sensitive as to who you have come and speak.
• Retain the unconference. One of the amazing success stories of WordCamp Mid-Atlantic 2010 was the unconference, organized by Steve Fisher. Besides the pre-scheduled and organized tracks that are familiar to conference goers, we provided a separate, yet equal unconference for ad-hoc discussion and talks. The only thing I’d change is to make it true barcamp style and make a no-powerpoint rule.
• No one organizer. I became the defacto organizer for both events. While I had varying degrees of help for both, I really became the guy for the event. This was not wise on my part. There should be an organizer in each city.

This is Baltimore’s event. This is Washington’s event. This event brilliantly integrated both communities. It really, really did. I want to see it continue (obviously with new leadership), but I want it to be with people who take it seriously and can make it better than it ever was. Put your own spin on it. Make it your own, not mine.

Matt Mullenweg announced during his State of the Word speech, thaa going forward, WordPress and WordPress MU (Multi-user) would be merged. In principle, this is not all that surprising, as WPMU offers a single major feature that WordPRess single user does not – the ability to have multiple blogs with a single install.

In talking to attendees of the event, there were few details given in this announcement but conventional wisdom suggests that, either during the installation process or later down the road, a blog administrator would have the ability to “flip a switch” and turn on the capabilities of the WordPress MU system.

This seems to segue with an earlier announcement from the event that the BuddyPress plugins that turn a WPMU installation into a social network, would be made available as compatible with WordPress blogs.

It’s also unclear when this merging of streams will actually occur, but my best guess is WordPress 2.9.

More details as we get them.

Our Challenges

Let me back up for a moment and paint a picture of the landscape we dealt with in organizing this event. From the outset, I explicitly gave the event a number of roadblocks. More so, I gambled a lot with the event.

For one, there has never been, to my knowledge, any WordCamp event that has been focused to a region, and not a city. Even events branded to a country, such as WordCamp China, were really still city-specific (Shanghai in that case).

The original organizer of our event was going to place it in DC and brand it WordCamp DC. I had a fundamental problem with this idea because DC has enough of a social media presence already, and I felt like there was talent, knowledge and community to be tapped into in the larger region. City-based events tend to reinforce the already existing city-community norms and creates silos. I’m all about connecting silos (a theme that would be echoed throughout the event). So when I took over as the organizer, I moved it out of DC and rebranded it as WordCamp Mid-Atlantic with an express intention of marketing it to not only DC, but also Baltimore and Philadelphia – cities that have their own unique personalities, experiences and perspectives.

As a rider to the first challenge, I also intentionally placed the event in Baltimore. Some people questioned the wisdom of this, and in fact, Matt Mullenweg gave me a bit of a hard time at last years San Francisco event for wanting to do the event in Baltimore (it was before there were active plans). Baltimore suffers a negative perception syndrome as a unattractive, petulant younger sibling of Washington, DC – a city filled with sexiness and stature.

However, Baltimore has its own unique identity that is emerging. Thanks in large part to serial entrepreneur, David Troy, things are actually beginning to develop in the city. From a vibrant co-working community, Beehive Baltimore to the Baltimore Angels Network, a group of local businesspeople looking for great ideas to get behind and fund.

Juxtapose this emerging community against a central location between Washington and Philadelphia, ease of transportation via BWI or the Amtrak station across the street, the state of the art University of Baltimore Business Center – it made complete sense to support that city.

The third challenge I faced immediately was the decision to invite Anil Dash, a Senior Vice President and co-founder of WordPress rival SixApart. I knew I wanted Anil to come speak to our community for a number of reasons I will get into later. I also knew it would create controversy and setup certain scenarios where members of the greater WordPress community might criticize or outright disparage our event. It was a choice I made for intentional reasons. More on that in a bit.

The Event and Logistics

If it was possible to have an event go off seamlessly without a single technical glitch (including persistent wifi throughout the day), I would not have known. Since I go to events, conferences and unconferences around the country, I have a fair degree of experience in these things. It doesn’t ever happen.

EVERY conference organizer will tell you that wifi is always a problem. That issues like laptop hookups never work all the way through the day. That schedules are kept. That audiences always engage. That attendence was 110% fill rate.

These things don’t happen. Ever. Wireless always breaks. Somebody is bound to not be able to get the A/V equipment working so that their presentation can be used. Sessions always run over and organizers are always left scrambling to figure out how to get back on schedule. Crowds get bored and wander for food or cigarettes during sessions. Speakers aren’t dynamic enough and tend to be boring.

None of this happened this weekend. None of it. And whoa… I have no idea how, but I’m not arguing. Thank you all for helping us stay on target.

Ignite Baltimore

As part of the original push to support the local Baltimore community, I also asked the Ignite Baltimore folks to come and host a mini-track of presentations, one between each session. Ignite Baltimore co-host, Patti Chan of 600Block MC’d these talks.

Sidenote: For those not familiar with Ignite, speakers are given 5 minutes to do a presentation with 20 slides, each of which automatically advances after 15 seconds. They are lightning talks, and the speakers are dynamic, insightful and passionate.

Throughout the day, these Ignite talks were provided as a way to break things up, give WordPressers something else to think about – such as running a startup, culture and art, and even applying an Agile development methods to lifestyle. It worked, and it worked beautifully. Thank you, Patti and crew.

Anil Dash, SixApart and WordPress

Of course, the elephant in the room for this whole thing, was Anil Dash kicking the day off with a keynote. Based on historical angst, this was somewhat akin to inviting a wolf into the hen house. However, I know that there is a symbiosis between the rival SixApart suite of products and WordPress’ suite of products.

When I reached out to Anil to pitch him on the idea, my idea was… let’s talk about what SixApart is learning from WordPress and how the two are collaborating. Anil took it a step farther.

He spoke of islands of networks, where a single blogger could create their own community or social network by using BuddyPress or Movable Type Community. Yet that only solves technical problems. It does not address issues that arise from lack of connectedness. He spoke about how our communities really are very similar because we all love blogging and want to see the medium thrive.

He then went on to announce the release of a suite of plugins that SixApart is releasing for WordPress. This kind of symbiotic relationship is not new. When Automattic released the highly popular Akismet anti-spam plugin, the first non-WordPress version was for Movable Type. Of course, Automattic properties IntenseDebate and PollDaddy can also be used transparently anywhere on the web, whether on TypePad, Blogger or Expression Engine.

Historically, SixApart hasn’t done all that much outside of their own suite of products and though they admit to needing to do more, they are now making their efforts to cross over platforms and reach out to the greater community. What’s good for blogging is good for both WordPress and the SixApart platforms.

Frankly, Anil came into the lions den needing to play nice, balanced the entire day extremely well, knocked the ball out of the ballpark by being extremely embracing of our community, putting the questioning crowd at ease with humor, style and grace and gave us something productive. Anil tells me this is only the beginning.

I say, don’t discount SixApart. If you’re a WordPress user, developer, theme designer or simply an interested onlooker – don’t discount these guys. We are all in this thing together. Frankly, sometimes MovableType is a better solution than WordPress. Sometimes it’s Drupal, though it’s never Joomla (Sorry, Joomla folks :-)).

As a note, the entire keynote was captured on video and can be seen here.

Finally…

I’d like to send another shout out to our sponsors, Network Solutions, JESS3, Amplify, Blue Sky Factory, Groove Commerce, WebDevStudios, SkinnyMinnyMedia, Margaret Roach, The Sister Project, iStrategyLabs, AwayFind, Mingle360 and Sticker Giant. It was a truly unbelievable day.

Really Finally…

I let this slip on Twitter so I might as well acknowledge it. We are tentatively targetting May 8, 2010 for WordCamp Mid-Atlantic 2010. Please subscribe to wordcampmidatlantic.com to be notified when tickets go on sale later this year.

* All Photos were taken by Dawn Casey, dubbed the official photographer of WordCamp Mid-Atlantic. To view the whole set and find more of her work, please visit her Flickr page or read her recap of this event from a photographer standpoint.

Along the way, people have been asking me, “What the heck is WordCamp?” If you’ve never experienced an unconference, it might be hard to explain. In essence, it’s a loosely organized event put together to draw the WordPress community out, share experiences, instruct, learn, network and connect. WordCamp is a one day event that will have a variety of speakers, a technical and basic track, plenty of open space to launch into small groups if people felt inclined and basically learn from each other.

WordCamps are typically geared toward a particular city. I chose to lead a new regional-based event that is focused on Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The event is held in Baltimore because it’s centrally located, and the blogging/social media/technical scene is least developed there out of the three cities. Baltimore has significant potential and has some great leaders in the community. I hope our event will spur that forward.

I’m excited about this opportunity and grateful to my co-organizer, Jimmy Gardner, all the sponsors and speakers and the attendees who, with very little marketing, sold this thing out. It’s awesome to see such a great engagement.

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.

We are launching the website and information about the event with the announcement that WordPress founder, Matt Mullenweg, will be attending (and speaking). Subscribe to the RSS feed to stay up to date on speakers and other information you’re going to need and I look forward to seeing you in Baltimore!

Update: We’ve announced that Matt Mullenweg and Anil Dash of SixApart will be the Keynotes.

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.

Instead, my session was about findability. Findability is the concept that content can be “found” by readers. This is a common problem that many bloggers wrestle with, and many have tried a wide variety of techniques to make their blogs more findable. This is not the same as SEO, though. SEO is a subset of findability. It’s findability for machines. Findability is as much about the data structure as the content or theme structure or the device compatibility (is it mobile compatible, for instance?)

Our product at Lijit tries to address a lot of the issues of findability. Re-search provides relevant search data to readers coming from the search engines (think landing pages). It makes all the bloggers content findable by indexing not just the site, but all the other related content associated with the user.

What I found interesting, and that I did not know when I wrote my post, was that the rest of the day would reinforce the core principles of my session. Tantek Çelik expounded on Microformats. There was an SEO session. Numerous bloggers talked to me throughout the day explaining solutions that they have come up with for making a blog more findable. Solutions ranged from content practices, to theme structures to custom homegrown plugins that do various things. It was fascinating.

I realize now what I thought I realized then, but didn’t really realize until now. All bloggers are faced with the same core challenges. The challenges manifest themselves in different ways, but at the end of the day findability is on the forefront of everyones minds.

1. All bloggers want to drive traffic. Whether the traffic is internal, a key interest of those in the SEO/SEM/Ad space, or within their sphere of influence, an interest of bloggers looking to build their personal brand.
2. All bloggers want to provide value to readers. No blogger wants search engine traffic to go away. Everyone wants to find a way to keep that traffic and convert it into value, whether ad-driven or otherwise, for their blog
3. Bloggers are grappling with ways to break apart from the pack. 99.999% of blogs (a totally random number) really look the same at the end of the day. I don’t mean the user interface, but I do mean the theme structure. Structures are built in expected way, and modules/widgets are expected to behave similar ways, regardless of the blog
4. WordPress cannot solve all the problems of all the blogs. Keep in mind that WordPress is a tool, not a lifestyle. (And I’d say the same thing to social media aficionados). WordPress is evolving into something, but much of the value that bloggers can add, allowing themselves to be different or drive more traffic (see point 1 or 2), are created by smart people trying to bring a solution to a problem.
5. At the end of the day, every bloggers wants a kickass community of readers and commenters that reinforce their worth in the world. Kathy Sierra talks about creating passionate users, and she’s talking about principles of an engaged community. Findability helps the community engage.

Doing a 9am session is hard. Everyone is still sleepy, and/or hung over, jetlagged, etc. At the end of my session, I felt like I said what I needed to say. However, by the end of the weekend, I realized that much of WordCamp reinforced exactly the concerns that I brought up to kick off the opening session. That’s encouraging to me as a WordPress user and as someone who tries to understand the dynamics of the greater community. Of course, it encourages me as a Lijit guy as I see that our product can directly address many of the challenges that I heard repeated throughout the weekend.

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.

Really, Findability is all about the right data being available to the reader, whether that reader is human or a machine (search engines). To that end, theme structure is a major area of concerns. Theme developers can setup their themes to have related posts or popular posts functionality, as well as attention to search implementation. I suggested theme authors should provide search results in full format, and not simply excerpts.

Secondly, findability is all about metadata and descriptive data. Microformats provide a human semantic understanding to machine-oriented descriptive data. Examples are

,

as well as WordPress built in XFN. Human understanding of machine data.

Multimedia content should take advantage of descriptive content. This means image tagging, show notes for podcasts and caption text for videos. Of course, and understanding of tags and categories is helpful.

Thirdly, I touched briefly on Ambient Findability, a concept introduced by Peter Morville in the O’Reilly publication with the same name. Ambient Findability suggests that no matter what, where or how, content should be easily findable. At b5media the mantra was “the right content, at the right time, to the right person on the right device”. Morville asks three questions:

1. Can people find your blog?
2. Can people find their way around your blog?
3. Can people find your content, products and services despite your blog?

Finally, I suggested four plugins/features that can enhance the findability of a site:

1. Possibly Related Posts – Only available for WordPress.com users.
2. Search Everything – makes all areas of WordPress content available for the default search
3. Microformats plugins – adds additional Microformats support to WordPress: Micro Anywhere, Blog Summary and Save Microformats
4. Lijit for WordPress – our new plugin that allows registration and configuration from inside of the WordPress admin. Also, it makes it possible to hijack the theme search form.

The slide deck from the session is available below. It is Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial licensed. In other words, use the idea, use the concepts, use the deck in it’s entirety as long as you attrbiute me. I’m Aaaron Brazell from Technosailor.com in case you didn’t know. Oh, and if you make money, I expect a cut. ;-)

San Francisco

Tomorrow morning, I head out to San Francisco for WordCamp 2008. This will be my third trip to the Bay Area for this very special event and I’ll be speaking for the second time (third if you include WordCamp Dallas earlier this year). WordCamp is an exciting event for bloggers, particularly WordPress bloggers. It gives an opportunity for folks to come together and get their geek on with technical WordPress know-how or enjoy the community with other sessions geared toward more generalized topics.

For my part, I’ll be attending on behalf of Lijit along with Micah Baldwin, but will also be speaking on Findability and getting information in front of readers while driving them deeper into the site. I’ll release my slide deck in Creative Commons format after the event so look for it next week.

Mile High, Colliding with the DNC

Though I don’t anticipate participating in the DNC, I will be heading to the Rockies (Boulder to be exact) to work at Lijit World Headquarters. It will be crazy with 50k people coming in to see our next president accept his nomination and all the festivities that are involved. Someone told me there were 400 parties scheduled for the DNC which makes me think that perhaps the political catch-phrase shouldn’t be “Yes We Can” and more “1 Party, 400 parties”. DNC marketing executives have not returned comment on this idea. ;-)

What’s Happening in Vegas Needs to get On Your Calendar

Finally, next month I’ll be in Las Vegas for the annual Blog World Expo. This was one of three events I planned at the beginning of the year to be at. I attended SXSW, but will miss Gnomedex so two out of three isn’t bad.

I was talking to Rick Calvert, the organizer, and he mentioned that August 22 is the absolute drop-dead date for early registration and prices will go up significantly after that. So get registered!

On a related note, I’m looking for a hotel room to crash on the night of the 22nd. Due to Dividend Miles award travel, I ended up extending my stay a day later than most people go home. So if you’re still around Vegas for that night, give me a shout. I am open to splitting a room.

Either that or the fine folks at Southwest or JetBlue, both of whom are doing a fine job in reaching out to the social media community, can comp me a ticket. ;)

So, if our worlds might collide at one of these events, please give me a shout or look me up. My phone number is 410-608-6620.

See, I’ve been lucky enough to attend a lot of conferences and events and to interact with lots of people along the way. Most of the folks I interact with are early adopter kinds of folks that love jumping all over the newest and greatest social tools, etc. We all travel in the same circles so we always see the same people at conferences and while it’s great, it was really catching to interact with a group that doesn’t necessarily operate in those circles.

The WordCamp Dallas group was different than even WordCamp San Francisco where Om Malik has spoke two years in a row and where folks like Dave Winer, Mike Arrington, Matt Cutts and others have spoken or made some kind of appearance in the past. There were very few of the “internet rock star” types in Dallas, but the demographic that was there made it so much more rich and interesting.

Photo Credit: ronalfy

ContentCamp

It was different, but it was good. I discovered a really telling and exciting thread through the entire weekend as I observed a few this:

1. Going into the event, I was asked to make my session technical to meet a technical audience. There were some technical people in the audience, but I felt it important to adjust my presentation to be a bit less geeky.
2. The most well received sessions of the weekend dealt with copyright and licensing, developing a community around your blog and the business blogging panel.
3. The number of people was notable who simply talked about wanting to write more, and having better insight on writing in general

To me, the common denominator, and the highlighted theme for the entire weekend, was not WordPress. Despite the fact WordPress 2.5 was released and is being well received across the board (I was watching Twitter for about 3 hours after the announcement and saw nothing but good reports). Even though the premise of the event is All Things WordPress the most value seemed to surround content.

Guess what? Content is non-platformic. Easily, this event could have been a general blogging event. Easily, value could have been gained by Movable Type users and Typepad users; by those on Blogger or Textpattern or Drupal.

Why was it that I found myself silently annoyed by WordPress fanboism in much the same way that frustration with Applegasms – the reaction by Apple fanbois whenever the beloved Cupertino company announces something new – caused me to register applegasms.com?

I reckon my annoyance comes from my feeling that WordPress is a tool. It is a wonderfully awesome tool that I support, encourage and use. However, at the end of the day, it is a tool. My friend and colleague Mark Jaquith, who is also one of the core WordPress developers, has a philosophy that I love: get WordPress to the point where the user has no idea that WordPress even exists.

At the end of the day, it’s not about if you use WordPress or Typepad or any other blog platform. Sure, there are things to consider when choosing. However, at the end of the day, it’s about creating engaging content that creates community between author and readers. That’s the important part.

Photo Credit: zizzybaloobah

Frisco, Texas

Although the event is called WordCamp Dallas, it was technically held in Frisco, Texas about 30 minutes north of Dallas. Frisco is an amazing city. In the short few days that I was there, I felt like I was watching the beginnings of a brand new city that in five years would be the hub of activity for miles around.

The city was gracious enough to lend us their City Council chamber which is an amazing, state of the art facility in itself. The acoustics of the domed room were so vibrant that I would love to play my guitar in the center of the room.

The city supported us and went out of their way to help us on a number of fronts. So, thank you, Frisco.

Photo Credit: ronalfy

Best Panel EVAR

The best panel I’ve ever been on (and no offense to every other panelist I’ve shared the stage with), was the business and blogging panel. It was such an honor to share the stage with Mark Ghosh, Matt Mullenweg and Liz Strauss. I felt like I shouldn’t be up there. Thank you, folks. That panel was the highlight of my weekend.

In summary, the professionalism and agility that this unconference was delivered in was nothing short of amazing. The sponsors were all in. The organizers were quite adept. The WordPress.com folks came in to support and WordPress 2.5 was launched in the heart of Texas. I had a blast.

Here’s the video, courtesy of Mark Hopkins at Mashable:

Thank you everybody for the great feedback and Mashable for recording the uStream.

Here, though, are some of the photos I’ve taken. I’ll add more as I can. This, again, is a feature of WordPress 2.5 so if you like to take pictures and show them off, or if you’re as hardcore as a photojournalist, you now have some pretty sexy tools at your finger tips.

Enjoy!

I figured it was a good time to look at what you can expect from this blog, and more specifically me, in 2008.

More Travel

I traveled more than I ever did before in 2007. Met some great people from the social media community. Reacquainted myself with others. Engaged in my first public speaking engagements. In essence, 2007 for me was about a definite maturing in my professional profile. I haven’t always executed well. Some people may not like me. Others might think I don’t like them. But, I’m happy with where 2007 has taken me.

In 2008, I expect more travel and that means more of an opportunity to meet you somewhere. Though nothing is definite yet, I’m hoping to make it to Future of Web Apps Miami and New Media Expo as well as near definite appearances at SXSWi, WordCamp Dallas, WordCamp San Francisco, Gnomedex 8 and Blog World Expo 2008.

There’s also rumor of b5media doing a cross country tour, but I can neither confirm nor deny that possibility. ;-)

Hyperlocal

One of the new buzzwords getting thrown around the Web 2.0-a-sphere is “hyperlocal” – the focus on local/regional services, community and communications. While 2007 has been critical for me in developing my reach internationally and nationally, I have neglected my profile here at home. In the words of Jesus, “A prophet is not without honor save in his own country,” and while I don’t claim to be a prophet, I did predict the Ravens loss to the Miami Dolphins this past Sunday.

In 2008, I plan to cultivate the relationships that I have begun to develop in the Baltimore/Washington region more throughly. For instance, Geoff Livingston and I will be launching a Blog Talk Radio show surrounding the social media and communications environment in the Washington, D.C. area entitled “District of Corruption”. This will begin at 2pm on Tuesday, January 8.

Other potential alliances exist between myself and Nick O’Neill of Social Times and All Facebook, Mike Brenner who is looking to launch Refresh Baltimore, Ann Bernard and Keith Casey at Why Go Solo, NewMediaJim, Frank Gruber of AOL and co-founder of TECH Cocktail, Greg Cangialosi of Blue Sky Factory… and others. In the new year, I’ll be focusing a lot of my time and energy in these areas and with these people and maybe something cool will come of it.

More Original Non-English Content

Carlos Granier-Phelps has been doing a smash up job producing original Spanish language content for Technosailor.com. I’ve learned from early mistakes and provided a separate Spanish feed for this content and I expect to learn more from the experiment. I say experiment because I did this not knowing what to expect. A month and a half in and I’m seeing definite signs of traction. It’s always hard to build a new audience, so I’m grateful to Carlos for helping to spearhead this under the Technosailor banner. Social media and business is not exclusive to English speakers and so I don’t want to ignore that demographic.

In an ideal world, I’d love to see the new year bring original French and, I don’t know, Japanese content as well. We’ll see. Certainly, let me know if you’re interested in reading or writing here.

We Ain’t Seesmic

Finally, you can expect more of the same from me. In the past year, I’ve recognized that it dilutes content to force a quota on myself. I used to force myself to write once a day at least and now I only write when inspired. As a result, my content is better and more original. Traffic has shot through the roof and my subscriber count has more than doubled. Unlike Seesmic, I’m not too concerned with what critics say. ;-)

Time to get going, the plane boards soon.

• Longest Trip: Toronto, 9 days, May 26-June 3. This trip encompassed Mesh Conference as well as b5 business in Toronto
• Shortest Trip: 1 Day (overnight), Toronto, Aug 23-24
• Most Enjoyable Trip: Gnomedex 7
• Least Enjoyable Trip: SXSW ’07 – The Hampton Inn was the beginning of a bad bad trip
• Trip I least wanted to go on that I enjoyed the most: PodCamp Philly
• Trip I most wanted to go on that I enjoyed the least: PodCamp Boston 2
• Best Networking Event: Blog World Expo
• Most drunken event: San Francisco, January 2007
• Most Expensive Trip: Blog World Expo, Las Vegas

Did you travel at all this year? What are your awards?