The WordCamp Report

Live Blogging from WordCamp San Francisco 2009

Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.TV is speaking upon community building as an expert of a video blog about tech news, reviews, and commentary.

Rule One – Know Thyself – Know They Blog! You must have value and know who you are and what you are capable of for your blog content. You can get caught up in a Blog Bog – you can’t have passion without a mission. You have to have a core brand value to get you “to the final frontier.” You may have a passion, but without a clear purpose and identity, you can’t go any further.

Rule Two – Start Compelling Conversations! Blogs made it possible for people to find talents they didn’t know they had, it helped give them a voice in world that wasn’t accessible before. Having the option to say anything you want can lead to clutter.

Rule Three – Value. You must offer value to give people a return on their investment of time during their visit to make them return for more. After you have established your core brand value and identity, you have to give them value, to find your audience and get them to come back and return with their friends.

She talked about using TweetDeck to find your audience. Set up columns with one using Twitter Search using keywords or phrases. It turns up all the results of those keywords. This allows you to track those discussing these subjects and participate in the discussion.

Rules Four – Make Friends Not Fans – We don’t talk at our audience in today’s new media. We talk with them. Ask questions, not just give answers. It creates a loyal audience. A loyal audience that wants to tell the world about you, sharing your funny or water cooler stories, so they will encourage others to visit your site.

Those with fans tend to disappoint their fans. Those with friends have a much “healthier” relationship with those who follow their sites. When you can’t access people or talk to them, when your platform is too far away from the people. When you maintain a relationship with others, you get more friends and loyalty.

Get away from the computer. Get face-to-face in addition to the virtual-to-virtual. Have meetups with your local fans when you travel. Listen to your audience. Listen to the opinions coming from everywhere, but you don’t have to act upon it, just listen, and decide for yourself which way to go. Too many cooks spoil the soup.

If you are participating in the community, you are a valuable asset to the community. You have people communicating and interacting, you have to maintain the level, and keep building the interactions. You have to reward participation.

Rule Five – Reward Participation. Giveaways, contests, create incentives for people to come to your blog, it helps the interactivity. When you begin, it might not be possible to attract a lot of people for the contest, but keep working at it. Start building relationships, show appreciation by giving free acknowledgments and appreciations, give away free schwag, blog about them, find a way to give back and move towards higher compensation as your site grows.

Rule Six – Take Breaks! Take a break. Get away. Think television shows. They take time off. Give your audience a chance to miss you. It helps you to come back refreshed with new energy and ideas.

Rule Seven – Always Upgrade. Upgrade your technology, software, services, blog, everything. Always be improving. Be striving for better, and better. Upgrade equipment, but also upgrade quality of content. Evolve. People love watching people grow and change and evolve.

Start with simple, grow slow. Keep learning, keep improving, let the audience see you care by changing with the times and their interests and abilities.

Scott Porad with Pet Holdings, the parent company of I Can Has Cheezburger? and Failblog.org, among many others.

What these sites have in common is they are entertainment/humor business, they are hosted on WordPress.com on the VIP hosting plan, among the top 50 blogs on the service, and they are based upon user generated and generated content.

He works with crowd sourcing and depends upon user interaction rather than distributed content, though sites like these also help people distribute aggregated content as well.

How can you use your users, fans of what you are doing, to help you create your content as well as drive the content to make it even more relevant to them.

This technique is not new. The Gong Show was one of the first examples of the audience controlling and generating content. Call-in Talk Radio is another example, as is educational journals, and other mediums that thrive on user generated content. He believes it creates more authentic user experiences for people rather than a dried, controlled format. America’s Funniest Videos is a prime example of user generated content dictating content production, and made it more participatory. You don’t have to generate content, people bring it to you.

Online generated content is doing the same thing, using the tools people already have, cameras, videos, computers, and allowing them to mix and mashup. News publishers are contributing content, allowing publishers and editors to choose what is broadcast, but technology is now permitting people to contribute and choose what comes back to them.

Crowd sourcing is the notion of the wisdom of the crowds. If I ask you a question, you may or may not be right, as everyone has an option, but if you ask many people to ask a lot of other people, if you took all the collective experiences, you would get an answer. The crowd can be more wise than any one person.

User generated content applies crowd sourcing to the process of letting the crowd speak and have their say, dictating and controlling the process.

He uses the example of American Idol. The production boils down the contestants to the final ones, and then the audience makes the final choices. JPG magazine for professional photographers built in an army of people to help promote the magazine because they’ve included subscriber content, the people have their say in the final version of the magazine.

Threadless has a design contest very week for their t-shirts, and the next week, they print those up based upon the audience’s input. They know people will buy them because they requested them.

Amazon.com is another example of letting the audience review and comment on any product or service. User generated content can quickly turn into “user generated crap” and Amazon invites people to sort reviews by what the audience thinks is most helpful in the reviews, such as the “did this review help you” to score the score. The yes or no review or judgement is much more effective than the “rate this” from a 1-10 score.

“They Want Your Wallet” or “Knife pointing” is a technique of being really clear on asking for specific user generated content. Be specific or you get junk.

How do you sustain and monetize this. There are some categories of content you can’t get your content for free. If you are a newspaper and you need someone who has to work really hard to get the content, you have to pay for that labor. Some areas must reward their users in order to get continued quality content.

To keep the energy and commitment to continued user generated content, he says that most people want to have attention and “fame.” He calls this “Internet Famous,” the little bits of famous, like when you have a lot of subscribers, a video or post with sudden flash of popularity, a lot of Twitter followers, a way for people to feel specific for their smaller accomplishment, rather than a top 10 hit single or big “TV” famous. When people feel special, they feel like they are part of the process, thus attention and “Internet famous” is enough to reward them.

He talks about the “Life of a LOL.” People see their stuff and think, “That’s easy. I can do it.” Their team worked hard to make their content submit page to be as simple as possible. As few choices and options as possible. It takes them through the steps, one at a time, easily. The name of the game is to get as much as can but keep it as simple as possible.

Their “editors” screen for porn and violence but little else. They have to be aggressive at filtering comments and content to ensure good taste and appropriates.

They then offer voting models for people to choose win or fail for the various images, or a very simple voting technique. Sometimes they want to know how funny, or just if it is funny – yes or no. There is also a “flagging” option to help users to mark content as possibly inappropriate.

Once the vote is done, they publish the finalists, and then ask another vote, and then boil it down, letting the users drive the content and the decisions.

 

John Lilly

John Lilly is the CEO of Mozilla Corporation. He joined Mozilla Corporation in 2005 as Vice President of Business Development and also served as COO and a member of the Board of Directors. Prior to this, Lilly was the founder, CEO, CTO and VP of products for Reactivity, a software company acquired by Cisco Systems in 2007. Previously, he held staff positions at Apple, Sun Microsystems and Trilogy Software. Lilly has been an active participant in open source projects, serving on the boards of the Open Source Applications Foundation and Participatory Culture Foundation. As CEO, John focuses on the product, technology and execution of the Mozilla Corporation.

[WordCamp bios]

 

John Lilly is introduced.

Lessons from Mozilla
7 insights, 2 problems
And some thoughts for 2009

And not the same for every project.

Slides flashing by too fast, EMBEDED BELOW.

Make products that don’t suck.

Push decisions as far out as possible.

1. High agreement on core values
2. Desicions rests with module owner
3.

They use a lot of conversation.

They have get togethers but loves the idea of camps all over the world.

Going over the makeup of the organization.

RC1 is coming out next week in 73 languages.

Making it easy is a huge priority.

But no matter how many people complain remember they might have some good points.

A couple points that stuck with me:

1. Didn’t care what browser a person used.  As long as they thought about their choice before using it.  Hated the type of people who used ie, JUST BECAUSE IT WAS THERE, and didn’t think about it.
2. Wasn’t worried about mobile space fully.  Phone where just getting up to snuff recently.  itunes App Store locked down too much. wireless providers way too locked down and not getting it. Nokia seems to possibly getting it.  And Google (Android) may work once they work out all the problems. No real comment on Blackberry. (And how about Windows Mobile Smartphones?)

Doesn’t follow slides all the time and a bit fast but VERY good speaker.

Live Blogging from WordCamp San Francisco 2009

Steve Souders is a high performance website expert formerly of Google. He worked on the web performance and open source initiatives and is the author of High Performance Web Sites. Steve serves as co-chair of Velocity, an event to promote web performances and practices for high performance sites, and co-founder of the Firebug Working Group.

He says that a lot of the problems associated with slow speeds for WordPress blogs are not the fault of WordPress but of the HTML in the WordPress Theme and Plugins.

He spoke about his work and books, including the sequel to his first book, “Even Faster High Performance Web Sites.

He recommends combining stylesheets so there are fewer requests to HTTP since it requires more overhead handling. For Parent/Child Themes with many stylesheets to handle all of the style requests, combine them into one or two or as few as you can. It works fine for those distributing WordPress Themes, as it makes it easier to have the Theme be more flexible, but if you are developing or designing your own, combine, combine, combine…

Don’t use @import in stylesheets. It loads them in parallel. If the first one has an @import, it sees it, then loads the next one, and if there is another @import in that stylesheet, it loads it again at that pot, creating sequential loading, not parallel, which causes the page to pause and take longer to load.

If you are loading extra stylesheets for different browsers, again, combine them into one to reduce the load time, even if they don’t apply to the masses – or maybe they might, such as the custom styles necessary for Internet Explorer versions.

The same thing applies to JavaScripts and other redundant scripts. Reduce them as much as possible. Concatanate jquery and AJAX scripts as much as possible. Scripts block downloads from moving forward. They have to load first, delaying the loading of the rest of the page elements and code.

He also recommends a technique called “lazy loading” described in Wikipedia, as a way to help delay and structure the loading of scripts to bypass the problem of delayed loading of all the bits and

He recommends using PHP CodeSniffer to help track down all the scripts and page loading slugs, the things that are slowing down your page execution and loading.

He also recommends combining CSS background images into sprites, making fewer HTTP requests for “static” images. CSS Sprite Generator will help to create these a bit easier, though he admits that there needs to be some more productive methods. CSS Sprites generator or CSS Sprite Generator help to create CSS sprites which reduces the load on the page.

Optimizing images is critical to really speeding up a page. Use smaller, lower resolution images, or use better compression to reduce the file size and page loading of larger images. smush.it! helps to reduce the image compression smaller. He also recommends preloading images when possible so they will load faster in parallel.

GPZIP is another way of speeding up the pages, empty cache before and after, use primed cache before and after, and a few other options.

As he spoke, he worked on a live page to make it faster and more streamlined, showing us the tests as he went through the process. Slides will be on his site.

They key to a better user experience is having a faster website so they spend more time on content and action and interaction than waiting for page loads.

Douglas Hanna

Douglas Hanna is a consultant, blogger, and speaker who specializes in customer service. He writes about customer service and the customer service experience on his blog, Service Untitled. Douglas has helped companies of all sizes improve their customer service since 2004 and has written numerous articles on how and why companies can use customer service as their competitive advantage.

When he isn’t blogging or consulting, Douglas works for Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and Akismet.com, as a “Communications Engineer.” At Automattic, Douglas spends most of his time running the day-to-day operations of the WordPress.org Showcase and helping to support WordPress.com users. When he isn’t doing anything related to work, Douglas enjoys reading and playing the piano and is a diehard Duke Blue Devils fan.

[WordCamp bios]

Douglas Hanna is showing us the WordPress Showcase which show different sites that use WordPress and how to submit sites.

Contains 390 entries with more then 2100 comments.

Requirements

• Using WordPress in a unique or innovative way.
• Attracting tens of thousands of regular readers.
• Being written by someone famous or especially notable in his or her particular field.
• Representing a notable organization, government entity, or corporation as an official blog or web site.

Overview of an entry.

Shows when entries where entered on the arhives and the tag cloud is good to see by type.

Going through a lot of different types, that even use WordPress simply, or so much so that he had to do some major digging to prove it.

Getting In

Things to think about

• Make sure it’s actually WP.
• Make sure you aren’t already in it.
• If it’s yet another blog, don’t.
• It’s needs to be up.
• Please only submit it once.
• Why should it be submitted in email

Meet criteria

Chris Pirillo

Chris Pirillo has been participating in Internet conversations since 1992, having launched Lockergnome.com as a content publishing network and building Gnomedex to be one of the blogosphere’s highly regarded conferences. He publishes a personal blog and lifecast to tens of thousands of viewers, and is a top subscribed partner on YouTube. When searching Google for “Chris,” his site is listed as the first result. He’s a monthly columnist for CPU Magazine, and has authored books on business and personal technology. Chris also produces weekly video segments for CNN.com Live, where he offers tech advice to a savvy audience.

[WordCamp bios]

Chris knew of Matt years ago.  Chris started on Moveabletype and switched to WordPress years ago.

Community is about people. If you diagram a person, how many others are the same but each are different. But that is community.

It isn’t about a company it’s about a culture.

The company does not make community.

He did not originally like the iPhone.  Did not see how he could like it. And then he used it.  But again it’s not the product it’s the community.

Community is becoming increasingly distributed.

It’s no longer a situation where all have to all go to one place.

Community requires tools that can’t be built.

A blog is just a tool. If you think that a blog is a community then you are just a tool.

A community is in your heart.

Community is a commodity, but people aren’t.

Community cannot be controlled, only guided.

Community is no longer defined by physical boundaries.

He collects garbage pail kids. He used to struggle to connect to other collectors yet now is able to easily find other collectors.

Community grows it’s own leaders.

Community is the antithesis of ego.

Respond to long negative attacks with

Attacks are lone people among many. As long as you connect.

Community is inside, part of you.

Ann Oyama, aka SuperAnn, works as a WordPress, web, and software developer who programs custom WordPress Themes and Plugins. She also runs BayAnime.com, a community site for San Francisco Bay area fans of anime, manga, and Japanese pop culture. She spoke on WordPress Themes customization.

She began with some basic coverage of good practices for WordPress and code development, then started on some basics of WordPress Themeing, including the stylesheet structure, WordPress Theme template hierarchy, and WordPress template tags.

She recommends you begin structuring and customizing the Theme with the index.php file, since it is used as the primary template file in the hierarchy of a Theme’s template generation.

The custom features she does on almost every Theme she creates begins with the header.php which includes logo, branding, menus and the functions which call in these features. She explained that while some of the changes customers want can happen with the stylesheet, some require editing and customizing the code within the template file.

Next is the sidebar.php, the area most requested to be changed and customized. You need to be familiar with its structure and formatting as well as the WordPress template tags that create and build up the sidebar elements.

The footer.php template file is always changed by customers, even though most ignore it. Horizontal menus are very popular both in the footer and the header, so you must understand how to make horitonal menus from list HTML tags and CSS.

Functions and Plugins are the next step in customizing and styling a Theme. These means understanding how Plugins work and how the code works. You will have to be familiar with how to write and manipulate the code to get it to do what you want, from customizing the various WordPress template files, Plugins, and PHP to actually overriding the pluggable.php functions.

Ann recommends that you do not change the core but change how WordPress works by Plugins and code within the Theme. You can use a variety of functions, filters, and action hooks to make WordPress behave differently. You do not have to interact directly with the database by knowing how these work.

You don’t have to know code to be able to code, just as long as you know some of the basics. Search the web, the WordPress fan blogs and such to find a ton of information on the web to help you customize things.

You can turn any of the code like that into a WordPress Plugin by using a very basic “intro” structure to the beginning of the code to convert it to a WordPress Plugin.

She ran out of time before she got to some of the code features and started answering questions about customizing WordPress Themes. She admits she likes to start with the WordPress Default Theme as she trusts the code in it, though some do not, using the Sandbox Theme which has very clean markup and microformats, allowing greater customization features through the stylesheet.

Anne really thinks of herself as a programmer, not designer, so when she chooses a Theme to start with, she looks at the architecture not the paint and works within that framework to customize and build upon to create a site.

Tara Hunt

Tara ‘miss rogue’ Hunt has spent most of her adult life online, either participating in or building communities. From the first wave of online marketing as it emerged in the late 90’s all the way to being a pioneer of new marketing in Silicon Valley in 2005, leading the wave into Web 2.0: the participatory web.

Tara understands how the the participatory web is changing all of our relationships: B2C, B2B and C2C. She doesn’t believe in pushing messages or creating strong brands, only in the power of building relationships. She co-founded Citizen Agency in 2006 with the mission of teaching her clients how to work more effectively with the communities they serve and how to embrace and adjust to all of the changes in culture businesses are facing. She maintains a popular blog over at HorsePigCow.

Tara wrote a book, The Whuffie Factor, to be available in April of 2009 published by Crown Business (division of Random House). The Whuffie Factor discusses the underlying secret of online communities: success in online communities is about building social capital online.

[WordCamp bios]

Tara has her book talked about. And then Tara comes out and we are introduced to Cory Dotrow, who termed a currency called whuffie. It can be used to relate in online social media.

She has thousand of people which she has both strong and weak relationships with.

Connections over time equals whuffie.

Connections don’t happen over night.

1. Turn the bull horn around.

People want to be treated special. So make sure to listen.

Focus on individuals while being part if a community.

Dell
dell hell website pointed Dell into create Direct2Dell and Michael Dell created a blogger lounge at CES to listen and then create IdeaStorm.

2. Become part of the community

Who do you serve?
Not everyone. Each person is different.

Find out and join them to learn.

Authenticity matters

What makes your customers like what you want to use to talk to them and integrate it.

You need to be remarkable

3. Create an amazing feelings

You can design for them

Automagicness: a user experience that makes it seem that things just happen as you wanted.

Automatically (a favorite word of mine and used by her) is shown in a couple sites where they take the info given and assume it knows what to do.

Throwing Sheep: fun lightweight activities that are simple that adds to the experience. For example Facebook’s poke and I like… (One was site for a baby growing up that took date info in picture to judge age of baby and what it may be.)

Dopplr shows the velocity of a person related to their activities.

Lighten Up: the ability to inject fun into serious and professional interactions.

Southwest Airlines rapping steward video shown.

Flickr added a talk like a Scurvy Dog (Pirate) under languages. It allowed them to connect.

Lighten up the 404 Error Page and change your email auto-responders.

4. Embrace the Chaos

Control the message and it’ll bite back.

Balance the openers and transparency. You’ll be better prepared for the unexpected.
Join in the conversation.

We create our own rat traps. So embrace the Chaos.

Whuffie grows.. The more you give away the more you gain.

5. Find your purpose

Find a way to give back to your community.

Gifts that won’t leave you broke.

Think customer-centrically.

Measure the number of people referring your website. Send referrals yourself so they come back to look for more.

Empower them like you have been empowered. Help them go farther.

Spread the love. Akoha

What you get is better word of mouth, customer referrals and social capital/whuffie.

Q: What social platforms would he suggest to promote music blog.
A: Get involved where they are at right now. And have Twitter, MySpace and Facebook pages follow the demand. Raise whuffie first and then follow demand.

After a very filling lunch Matt Mullenweg, remember ma.tt, somehow seemed to bound on stage. Well okay once dragged away from his iPhone.

Slide:
m(-@-)mullenweg.com
ma.tt
@photomatt
http://bit.ly/mattbook

Career Coach got up and asked Matt got asked to speak.

Now QUESTIONS

Q: Organization wants to use WordPress but is worried translation.
A: GlotPress translation service created by WordPress

Q: Migrating from Blogger to WordPress
A: Use the built in importer, it works very well.

Q: Why should they convert from Text Pattern to WordPress.
A: Its liked but WordPress can allow a lot of options.

Q: User level going to be strengthed or improved.
A: There are plugins but maybe they need to work on that some.

Q: Journalists and WordPress
A: The core can work decent, NY Times had no suggestion on plugins. But the pending posts as such allows editors to then edit and post.

Q: Widget Directory
A: Its a popular tag in plugins search, so they may add it but it can be searched for.

Q: What js library does he like suggest.
A: he suggests xpath

Q: Migrating pixel post to WordPress?
A: Will see if he can get some work on it.

Q: Questions about GPL plugins and a paid element?
A: They won’t run a store themselves but have no problem with it.

Q: Controlling plagerism?
A: Report to wp.com and they’ll have it down within 24 hours. If elsewhere contact Google and they are good about taking it out of the index.

Q: Why are plugins not avaiable on WordPress.com?
A: Main reason is security reasons. Also scalability. He’s debated it but all code would need code reviews or rebuilds.

Q: two question. Bliki is a WordPress wiki.
A: He hasn’t forgotten it, but no one is working on it.
Q: Google Wave
A: hasn’t had time to watch whole video but is curious of a wp combo.

Q: What makes a core.
A: What do most people use in WordPress and what’s cool. As long as it’s light-weight.

Q: OracleDB support.
A: They are looking at different database options. There are some working on a SQL layer so that other DBs could be used.

Q: Usage of different php versions?
A: php5 is now above 80%

Q: Simple non authed image posts.
A: A plugin author has done that and will tag a sample later.

Q: How does he see WP evolving.
A: He doesn’t see being enterprise but he is already seeing it being scalable and being used as a CMS more and more.

Q: Will the search being improved or
Just switching to Google.
A: Matt is using Google personally. They have a home grown that works pretty well for .com and may improve it and supply as a plugin.

Q: What is p2?
A: A wordpress theme like twitter.

Q: Caching
A: They have been working on scability and end-user experience. 2.8 has been all about making every byte count.

Final Question
Q: Post Revisions and db size?
A: They will grow but in the config file you can adjust how much you can limit how much is saved. They may switch to saving diffs later.

 

Matt Mullenweg

Matt is best known as the founding developer of WordPress, the blogging software he guided from a handful of users to the most widely used open source blog tool. In late 2005 he left CNET to found Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and Akismet.com. In his spare time he enjoys taking photographs and playing jazz.

[WordCamp bios]

 

Matt Mullenweg, no longer the number 1 Matt at ma.tt, talks about how it’s the 6th anniversary.

The start of WordPress.  He created a hack for b2 that ended up getting included. After the lead developer disappeared Matt asked what next. Mike Little contacted him and they used the GPL to expand on b2 and later when the original developer showed back up he gave the fork WordPress his blessing. Matt then went and added some important things and some major revisions.

He then went into his philosophy.

Keep the core simple and let people do whatever they want.

Looking over the numbers they’ve increased a huge amount. Except the amount of spam caught.

Some great quotes that will be posted in failed predictions. Slide Show coming.

WordCamp shirt development has gotten a lot more individual and varied.

WordCamp tattoo shown and gentleman introduced.

Slides of the admin over the years.

How changes caused minor revolutions. But hopefully to something people love.

• Quick Post
• Threaded Comments
• IntenseDebate
• 1 Click Upgrades
• Faster is the focus this time

Year of Themes
Theme Directory – Malware Free – Spam Free
GPL vs. Proprietary
GPL can be sold but also shared
Theme Developers Page – GPL Compliant – coming tomorrow
Thematic and Sandbox Themes are growing in numbers
GPL and Business

Alex King - Crowd Favorite
Primarly WordPress work
8 Full time employees
GPL frameworks
Created for complex CMS sites
WordPress Help Center – on call customization center which is growing

Fastest growing skill on ELance
Huge demand for the skill to

They’ve been busy
P2 – twitter style theme with a lot of power.
BuddyPress – Ability to create a Social Network with WordPress with back end.
Plugins -
3. Twitter plugin
2. Yet another related posts plugin
1. WPtouch

Moderator plugin

Lijit
PicApp
PollDaddy
VideoPress

2.8 is coming!!
2.7 was a huge release and relatively bug free
6 months since release
Widgets have been rewritten
Theme Directory built in
CodePress
Multiple galleries per page
Per page option for plugins
More Language Support

WordPress.tv
Videos open sourced and close captioning community supported.
Create a framework for Themes and Plugins to be translated

Number of WordCamps have exploded and have spread all over.

New iPhone App has been very sucessful and new version coming soon
New Blackberry App to be released soon

I’M Notifications built on top of Jabber in WordPress im.wordpress.com

Kill your Sacred Cows
WordPressMU and WordPress.org is merging.
Canonical Plugins – they are going to try combining forces in plugin development.

Getting Involved
WordPress Rangers

Writers
Artists
Connectors
Organizers
Code Poets
Patients
Leaders