With most of my blogs on the Wordpress platform AND with Mr. Wordpress himself, Matt Mullenweg coming to the event, there was NO WAY I was going to miss this event! Even the ADMU-DLSU UAAP games took second place (even if only for a few hours!

Mica rode along with me to the venue site, the College of St. Benilde. We exchanged our campers passes for real badges (complete with barcode scanning!). I was excited to meet Ria and Blogie again and met Gwen for the first time (although we had been Plurk buddies already for some time).

We opened with a plenary session that had the head of CSB and Blogie welcoming all the campers.While all this was going on, I spotted Matt sitting a few rows behind me and took this shot of Mr. Wordpress:

The morning sessions were breakaway ones, depending on whether you were on the user or developer track. Obviously, I chose the user track.

My first session was Blogging 102 with Jayvee.

Several of us almost did not make it to Jayvee's talk because we were told to go to Rm. 409. There we were, sitting in this room for over 10 minutes when Shari came dashing into the room to tell us we were in the wrong room! Apparently, there was ANOTHER Rm. 409 in another wing of the building! Yikes...we all half walked, half ran to the right room and thankfully still caught a great part of Jayvee's talk which was so well prepared and so educational.

My 2nd session was with Ely Apao who spoke on Organizing and Optimizing Your Wordpress Blog. A lot of what he spoke about affected those who were on Wordpress.org so I could not relate to all of them but I did take down some notes and took pictures of some of his presentation and am filing it away somewhere for future reference.

The 3rd session for the morning was one of the most hilarious but very informative sessions -- Video Blogging by Kring Elenzano.

Kring produces videos and took us through the pros and cons of video blogging (vlogging), how to make a vlog "kick-ass" as she called it. Her presentation was done in a very humorous way (combined of course with spiels from Kring that can only come from....Kring -- including a not-to-be-named comment that got us laughing because she did not realize she was being live-streamed. But I did take pics of every slide she put up because they were filled with great tips (including where lights should be positioned so the subject comes out as well as how to reduce noise and amplify the subject's voice). I absolutely did not regret going to this particular session!!

After a Chowking lunch, I made my way back to the auditorium for the afternoon plenary sessions.

Matt was first in line, regaling us first with interesting stats on the use of Wordpress in the Philippines. (Trivia: Did you know that the Philippines ranked #24 worldwide in terms of Wordpress users?)

He also talked about the future of Wordpress including a live demo of WP version 2.7 which is coming out in November. WOW! We were all eyes and ears!

Aileen (aka Ms. Google Philippines) took us next through Google Analytics (very interesting things you can find about your blog, where visitors come from, what converts more visitors to your site, etc). I think I will spend the next few weeks learning more about this one!

A few more sessions followed after this. Matt later came back on for a Q&A portion (a much awaited opportunity for the campers to ask questions of THE MAN OF THE HOUR). Unfortunately, I could not stay long as the car was already coming for me. I missed the photo op with Matt but came away with a WP bag filled with goodies from the sponsors.

Thanks to the Mindanao bloggers who spearheaded this event. You managed to pull this thing off with aplomb! Looking forward to our next WordCamp Philippines!!!

(Note:I will be updating this post with more pics and links to other sites writing about WordCamp Philippines. Meanwhile, I am already publishing this as tomorrow is the start of another work week and blogging will take a back seat.)

Kung tutuusin past time ko lamang ang pagbaba-blog at outlet para maipahayag ang aking mga sentimiento. Masaya ako na marami ang nagbabasa ng blog ko at kapag may nagko-comment, lalo na't hindi naman ako gaanong nag-e-effort na i-promote ito o sumulat ng paksa na hindi ko naman type. So bat pa ako pumunta sa gathering na gaya ng wordcamp?

In fairness, worth it and ibang experience ang event kahapon. Sa rami ng pwedeng pasukang silid para makinig sa mga lectures, ay nakatatlo lang kami . Iyon ay bukod sa pinaka-highlight na kung saan ibinalita ni Mr. Wordpress Matt Mullenweg ang latest at study nila sa mga bloggers ng wordpress.

May isa lang akong pinaghihinayangan na ‘di nabutan ‘yon iyong sinundan na lecture ni Mr. Danilo Arao. Subalit, ang makinig sa "Blogging and Journalism in the Philippines" ni Mr. Arao ay isang malaking bagay para sa akin. Nabigyan niya ako ng overview sa pagitan pagba-blog at journalism. Ano nga ba ang lakas na magagawa ng simpleng pagbibigay ng impormasyon sa internet, partikular na kung haka-haka lamang ang naisusulat? Kung ang mga journalists ay may sinusunod na code of ethics, aniya, dapat ganon din ang gawin ng mga bloggers.

Subalit, napaisip ako na teka karamihan pala ng mga posts ko ay may pagka-personal at medyo kalokohan. Magkagayon man, alam ko na naka-stick ako sa aking principles. Hindi ako nagba-blog para mag-report ng balita at basta-basta magbigay ng opinion. Nasa side ako ng journalism na to entertain and to persuade public opinion. May paksa na gusto kong talakayin na maaaring makapukaw ng kamalayan at interes ng mga mambabasa, sa paraang nasa-satisfy ako. I love Psychology and sociology!

Pero definitely, tama si Mr. Arao sa kanyang mga tinuran. Type ko ‘yong Barong na suot niya (proud Filipino talaga!), ang paraan niya ng pananalita ("your favorite justice secretary!) at ang pagtalon-talon niya sa harapan... hehehe! (iyon talaga!)

Okay din ‘yong kay Mr. Oliver "Blogie" Robillo, "Building a Blogging Community." Sa kanyang part napagtanto ko na pwede talagang maging channel ang pagba-blog para magkaroon ng boses at palitan ng impormasyon ang grupo ng mga tao na may iisang adhikain. Plus point pa rito iyong kanyang pagbabahagi sa tunay na kalagayan at persepsiyon ng media at ng mga tao tungkol sa Mindanao.

Sayang rin iyong unang lecture na pinuntahan namin, na di namin nasimulan, kasi maganda yung pinatutungkulan niya na may kinalaman sa paglalagay ng goal at pagtupad sa pangarap sa pamamagitan ng blog. Actually, may kinalaman dito ang iba pang speakers sa auditorium. Anila, may pera rin sa pagba-blog at malayo ang mararating ng isang blogger kung kanyang seseryosohin ang kanyang ginagawa. Hindi nga ba't marami ngayong job opening para sa mga web designer at web content writer.

Bagaman, pinalaking bata sa label ng Alaska ang tingin ko kay Mr. Wordpress Matt Mullenweg, tuwang-tuwa ang mga tao sa kanyang mga balita. Hindi ako tech-savvy eh pero thanks sa kanya dahil may wordpress at may blog ako.

Sa kabuuan tatlong bagay ang iniwan sa akin ng wordcamp

1. maging responsableng blogger
2. gamitin sa tama ang mga bentahe na naibibigay ng blog
3. may kita sa pagba-blog

sana next year maka-attend ako ulit at manalo ulit ako, yong mas malaking premyo naman. Hehehe!

note: yung pix to follow

Really, really tired, but Wordcamp Philippines 2008 was freakin' awesome. No really.

Quick rundown of notes and things before I take a nap:

Some statistics:

24th - where the Philippines is ranked among countries that use Wordpress
24th - where Wordpress.com is ranked among most popular sites (coincidence?)

Over 166% - Wordpress's growth from last year
Over 11.15 million - Downloads this year
3.6 million - Wordpress.org blogs
6.54 billion - Pageviews
4.96 - Average plugins per blog

7.63 million - Wordpress users

And some neat news: Wordpress 2.7 is due this November.

What to expect? Well...

• Navbar is now at the left of the screen
• Drag-and-drop is now available for the entire Dashboard
• Dynamic navigation in the Navbar
• In-Dashboard plugin navigation and installation, with update notices
• In-Dashboard theme navigation and installation
• Sticky posts are enabled
• "Write" page: Both columns are drag-and-drop-able
• "Write" page: Interface is customizable (you can remove some things you'll never use)
• and more.

On Buddypress:
Buddypress is a Wordpress-compatible social network thing - sort of like, quote-unquote, "Facebook in a box."
The site can sync with a blog and its plugins and you can do all sorts of other stuff with it, like sharing pictures, video, and so on

Ah, gotta love open forums.

Some Q&A with Matt: (disclaimer, I paraphrase a lot)

Will Wordpress.com have free access for adding javascript and such?
-There are possible security risks, so no.
Caching for Wordpress.com (without plugins)?
-There is a built-in fuction, but output-based plugins for this sort of thing are better at it.
Threaded comments? Other comment options?
-These will probably show up in 2.7 - things like replying in the admin panel, threaded comments and discussion, etc.
Will Wordpress servers switch to nginx?
-They'll move to it soon, but it'll need some tweaking.
Do you (Matt) still code?
-Yes, but mostly Core Wordpress stuff around the end of coding. He codes less now.
Will Wordpress.com users have a chance to use Google Adsense?
-Possibly.
What does "Unlucky in cards" mean? (refer to ma.tt)
-There's an old saying - "Lucky in cards, unlucky in love." If you reverse it, then it'd go "Unlucky in cards, lucky in love."
Can you (Matt) make a downloadable pdf of sorts for beginners who want a starting point for more advanced WP coding, because the WP codex is pretty tough to use if you don't know what you're doing.

By the way, Matt is a really popular guy here. I mean, really popular.

-The WP codex is indeed not very beginner-friendly, so the first priority is to clean it up and fix out-of-date stuff. How-to tutorials will also be added sometime. After all that, they may make an offline version, though seeing as WP needs you to be online, well.
Good books on Wordpress?
-Wordpress for Dummies is good. (Unfortunately, I couldn't note down the other stuff)
Do you have a full-time job, or do you work solely on WP? Do you profit from it?
-Automattic, a virtual company, is the company that does the coding for WP. Most of its time is devoted to coding for it, though Automattic does not actually "own" WP. Wordpress is also funded by 4 things:

• Upgrades on WP.com blogs (the ones you buy - ie: enabling CSS, more space, etc.)
• Ads
• VIP Program - payment from other large organizations that use it (ie: CIA, CNN, and so on)
• Akismet - free for personal use, but there is a commercial licensing fee.

Will the ability to upload pictures from mobile phones be added?
-There are two options: use the iPhone app (which is obscenely expensive here, so that's not much of an option). The other is that they [WP devteam] are developing a sort of "e-mail gateway" - send an e-mail of pictures or whatever through a mobile phone and it will be uploaded to the blog.
Job opportunities for Filipinos? A Filipino-language version of WP?
-Community translations help make multi-language versions of WP possible (so there'll eventually be a Filipino version out sometime). And for jobs, one only need to refer to automattic.com/jobs. Seeing as it's a virtual company, they don't discriminate other races, genders, etc.

And that was pretty much it. Some of the more incoherent stuff in my notes still needs deciphering.
After that, I left along with everyone else and then played a bit of IIDX (intermittently passing 9th Dan orz) and a bit of DDR too. Afterwards, I went off and bought another fountain pen - an unknown model of Inoxcrom. Someone please shoot me.

And... that's it. I'm beat. Good freakin' night.

PS: I met up with usagijen and her friend hazy. Jen... actually looked the way I expected her to look like >_>
PPS: I have a picture of me and Matt, but because I'm not exactly the most photogenic of people, I would prefer not to post it until people start sending death threats. Then I'll think about thinking about it.
PPPS: This article on ZDNet about the previous San Francisco Wordcamp has a lot more details on Buddypress and other neat stuff compared to my paltry little HP giveaway notebook, so go there and take a damn good look if you're interested.

"[...]
Hoje em dia, fica difícil para qualquer internauta viver sem usar pelo menos um produto ou serviço do Google (encaramos o desafio na pág. 66). Além da ferramenta de busca, Gmail, Gtalk, Google Reader, Orkut, Knol, YouTube, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Analytics, Google Translator e Google Gears fazem parte do dia-a-dia do designer Celso Bessa, de 31 anos. "Google, logo existo", escreveu ele em seu blog. Mas nem tudo funciona perfeitamente, claro. Como todos os mortais, Bessa, às vezes, se depara com mensagens de erro no Orkut e sofre quando o Gmail está indisponível - no mês passado, o serviço ficou fora do ar por algumas hora em diversos países por causa de uma falha no gerenciamento de contatos.
[...]"

(Revista INFO, da editora Abril, na edição 271, setembro de 2008)

Para quem pensou que o post A Vida Google - Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt revisam Descartes era uma egotrip, foi uma contribuição à reportagem acima.

Além da boa matéria e excelente dicas sobre o Google, na mesma edição há uma entrevista com Matt Mullenweg, criador do Wordpress e fundador da Automattic. A cada entrevista, eu respeito mais o Matt. Se rolar uma versão do WordCamp em São Paulo (não precisa nem ser igual ao Wordcamp San Franscisco) e ele vier, garanto que algumas cervejas que ele beber serão por minha conta.

PS: Tenho que atualizar o post "A Vida Google..." com um novo produto Google, o browser Chrome, que não vou falar aqui pois já tem muita gente boa falando. Não vou nem mencionar a fantástica estratégia de divulgação na forma de uma ótima história em quadrinhos produzida pelo Scott McCloud, fantástico estudioso do meio, que sou também mega-fã. Ops, falei!

:-)

This year, ServerBeach sponsored the San Francisco WordCamp 2008 and it was a great success! WordPress users travel from all over the world to attend these WordCamps and it really is great to see the dedication, humor, and unique perspectives these people bring.

“The idea behind Wordcamp is to set the tone for the following year. We want to expose you to the ideas that Wordpress has been thinking about over the last year. In turn, it’s the audience’s chance to connect on a personal level with Wordpress. It’s 100% user-driven, so here’s your chance.” -Matt Mullenweg

The event began with a private dinner for speakers with Automattic and ended with a WordPress Charity Scavenger Hunt. Generally WordCamp is a 2 day event, but this year they had 2 sessions going on at once throughout the day - the technical sessions for developers that gives a 'behind the scenes' view of coding with discussion and sessions for the WordPress users and supporters with a lot of talk about the applications.

This years speakers included the following:

• The Future of Education and Wordpress
• SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make - Stephan Spencer
• Open Source Business Models - Stephen O’Grady
• Andy Skelton - A musical performance
• LOLcats and the Secret of Virality
• Wordpress & Microformats
• Switching to Wordpress Painlessly - Lloyd Budd
• 450 Wordpress Power User Tips - Lorelle VanFossen
• Hassle-free Upgrades - Sam Bauers
• State of the Word - Matt Mullenweg
• Get Friendly with BuddyPress - Andy Peatling
• Democratizing the Web through Global Voices - Jeremy Clarke
• An interview with Om Malik
• Riding the Crazyhorse - Liz Danzico and Jane Wells
• A musical performance by Chuck Lewis aka SEO Rapper
• Kicking Ass and Creating Passionate Users - Kathy Sierra

Ben Huh, CEO of Icanhascheezburger gave an awesome presentation on the Secret of Virality. "Virality is based on people’s good will. You want to maintain trust and good will. Have an honest relationship with your users. You get real traffic from people who will come back. Don’t be like a telemarketer." He ended with quite a bold statement, calling it his "Final Words of Wisdom", that I cannot post on here, but you can view his presentation in full by heading over to the ZDNet Blog.

Another interesting presentation was Aaron Brazell, lead editor at technosailor.com who touched on Search and Findability.

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 suggest theme authors should provide search results in full format, and not simply excerpts.

More of these presentations can be found by doing a search for "WordPress 2008" and if you're into blogging, SEO, or just learning how social networking can help you, I highly recommend checking some of these out.

To end the weekend of events, there was the scavenger hunt. The hunt was made up of 11 teams of four which purpose was to raise money for 826 Valencia, an organization which offers free educational programs to encourage students to improve their writing skills. The teams raced all over San Francisco for hours trying to solve the clues and take pictures of themselves in front of the treasures and upload them to Flickr.

We've also posted some of our personal pictures taken from the event on the PEER 1 Community.

This is one of my favorite events as it is a great opportunity for an investor/board member type like me to get a good sense of the community around our company's product -- while Matt and Toni give us updates on the community (which they consider a critical consituency and source of strategic value), that just is not the same as meeting community members themselves and hearing what is on their mind.

Regrettably I had to miss Wordcamp this year as I was on a vaca with my family on a remote lake in Maine. However, last night we rolled into Hanover, NH, to drop our daughter off at soccer camp, and as I am reconnecting via my iPhone (after a week blissfully unplugged), I am happy to see that there is lots of good coverage of the event which from a distance seems to have been a success.

From a TechCruncc post, I picked up some stats Matt shard to illustrate the fantastic growth Wordpress has seen: monthly pageviews up from just over a billion to 6.5 billion, 32million new blog posts, and an audience that, according to Comscore figures for unique monthly visitors, is now 6 times that of nearest competitor Typepad.

It certainly has been a good year for Wordpress, and while the challenges are tougher than ever, the opportunities are also greater than ever, and we are banking on the next year being even stronger.

WordPress.com
WordPress.com provides free weblog hosting (from company Automattic). It opened to November 21, 2005.

It runs WordPress MU, a version of the original software that allows people to create and manage their own weblogs without requiring the time, money and technical knowledge involved in setting up WordPress on an ordinary hosting account. It is financially supported via the use of Google Adsense banners and paid upgrades.

wordpress.org
WordPress is a self-hosted blog publishing system written in PHP. All data is stored in a MySQL database. The name WordPress was suggested by Christine Selleck, a friend of lead developer Matt Mullenweg.

The latest release of WordPress is version 2.6, released on 15 July 2008. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2.

 
Matt is the cofounding developer behind the open source WordPress blogging platform and its founding company AutomatticA Houston native, Matt also serves as an adviser to Sphere and WeGame.

San Francisco, CA, started 07-05 - automattic.com

The below information is taken from crunchbase.com

Automattic is a web development and blogware company which can attribute much of its success to its popular blog platform Wordpress.com, an adaptation of the open source WordPress project. The company was founded by 20-something Matt Mullenweg who continues to be the primary developer and spokesman for the company. Former OddPost CEO and Yahoo Senior Executive Toni Schneider is CEO.

In addition to having 4 self-produced products (WordPress.com, WordPress.org, Akismet.com and bbPress) Automattic will now integrate Gravatar identity badges and all of Gravatar’s premium features into WordPress templates. Gravatar is Automattic’s first acquisition.

There are more than a million blogs hosted by Automattic, with thousands of new ones created each day.

Genial entrevista de Info Technology a Matt Mullenweg dividida en dos partes.

]]> http://joeduck.wordpress.com/?p=1884 Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:25:14 +0000 JoeDuck http://joeduck.wordpress.com/?p=1884 WordPress is one of those amazing Web 2.0 companies that always impresses you with innovation and quality.

Here, they have created a way to better index WordPress blog content using Google sitemaps.  WordPres was was already the best CMS system in terms of facilitatating proper search rankings through categories, tagging, and general structure.    Ironically WordPress is better than Google's own Blogger.com - ie I think it's fair to say that an identical blog written to the two CMS would rank better in the WordPress version because it is far more robust in terms of crosslinking, creating categories, and with the sitemap feature even pushing out content descriptions to Google.      To Google's credit they do not appear to elevate blogger content above others - in fact I think the algorithm accurately notes that bloggers blogs have far more spam than WordPress.

Of course one of the best aspects of WordPress is that Matt and his merry band of WordPressers don't charge a dime for all their great WP work.   They make enough off of spam blocking "Akismet" which is sold to big companies for enterprise network use, and pick up a few bucks from various add-on features such as domain names and CMS styling at WordPress.     This is a perfect example of how innovative entrepreneurship, global scale technology, profit and non-profit can all mix comfortably in systems that work well for every participant.

WordPress dudes, keep up the amazing work!

http://Larrysinclair0926.com

Larry Sinclair was attacked and smeared before his move and many of the attacks came from bloggers on Wordpress. Those attacks continue on Wordpress, despite the notifications sent to Wordpress. Many of the attackers of the smear campaign use screen names of legitimate commenters in an attempt to discredit Sinclair.

Intelligent and informed truth seekers hopefully will see past this charade.

http://larrysinclair0926.wordpress.com

Larry Sinclair's new blog on his website is:

http://larrysinclair0926.com

Prior to leaving Wordpress, Larry Sinclair and those following his story were subjected to personal attacks, death threats and public display of private information. Some of these attacks and violations of law came from other Wordpress blogs. Larry Sinclair and other bloggers have reported some of the worst of these violators.

I have reported the worst Wordpress violator several times. This violator has been consistently in violation of WordPress policies as well as violating the law. On one occasion after reporting this blog run by the lowest forms of humanity, retribution was attempted and my blog was temporarily suspended. I have emailed Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress on two occasions. The last email was sent as a courtesy to alert him  to the severity of the situation and the possible legal ramifications. Here is a copy of the email:

Matt was with the Greek Bloggers for a second time and he gave a speach mostly about the future plans of Wordpress. Some of the information revealed there, were first time public announcements.

Enjoy Matt as much as we did.

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.611246&w=425&h=350&fv=]

Coming back from an amazing time in NYC for Internet Week, I was reminded why one should never check bags. I flew from New York to Chicago with a layover in Philadelphia all on US Airways. When I arrived at my final destination my bag was missing. I filed a complaint and was told it should arrive on the next plane and would be hand delivered to me that night. 24 hours later it finally arrived...well some of it did.

My bag had been picked through and the following items were stolen:

• Nikon D40X DSLR Body
• 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G AF-S DX
• 55-200mm f/4-5.6 ED AF-S DX
• Nikon camera remote
• Nikon SB-600 Speedlight
• lens polarizers
• lens cleaning cloth
• 2 Nikon camera batteries
• Package of 12 lithium ion AA batteries
• 2 GB SD card
• 3-4GB SD cards
• Nikon brand camera case
• Silver Necklace
• Silver chain attachment for Purse
• Adobe mobile charger (from my Webby Awards goody bag)

I then remembered that Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress also had camera equipment stolen on a recent flight. I re read this blog post and was shocked at the similarities.

• US Airways
• Philadelphia
• Had Nikon Camera Equipment stolen
• Bags were missing at first then showed up ransacked
• Were both given the run around by the airline

According to US Airway's policy they aren't liable for the following items being damaged or misplaced while in their care:

• silverware
• negotiable papers/securities/documents
• spirits
• precious metals/stones
• books/manuscripts/publications
• optics
• natural fur products
• sound reproduction equipment & related items
• keys
• antiques/heirlooms/collectibles
• photographic/cinematographic audio/video equipment & related items
• blueprints
• artistic items
• computer hardware/software & related items
• jewelry
• lifesaving medication
• business samples/equipment/documents & irreplaceable items

So what do they cover?

With the level of security in airports these days how can this go unnoticed? US Airways needs to clean up their act.

And I will never check bags again. Lesson learned.

Now for the 4 reasons Not to Fly US Airways:

1. They do not care about their customers
2. Their planes are old, stinky, and well, they just "plane" ole' suck
3. According to US Airways, the customer is NOT always right
4. They are aware of problems at airports and plan on doing nothing about them

Links:

• US Airways Baggage Liability info
• Matt Mullenweg's post on his US Airways fiasco
• How to deter baggage theft

UPDATE:

The amazing people over at MWW and Nikon heard about my sad story and are lending me a Nikon D80 for 30 days. Thank you guys!!!!

Digg Love Please!!

Io & Matt Mullenweg

Originally uploaded by Air Force One

Quale migliore occasione di provare una nuova funzione di Flickr che permette di bloggare una foto direttamente dalla sua interfaccia? Sono curioso di vedere che esce fuori.

La foto in questione ritrae il sottoscritto in compagnia di Matt Mullenweg un simpatico ragazzo americano che ha realizzato il software ed il sito che supporta questo blog e quello di Deep Space One.

Ha 10 anni circa meno di me ed è a capo della sua startup "Automattic" ed è trattato come una star...

L'ho incontrato nell'ambito dell'iWordCamp 2008 il meeting (il BarCamp) italiano di chi utilizza la piattaforma Wordpress per diletto o per lavoro.

Grazie a Matt e grazie agli organizzatori dell'iWordCamp. Spero che il prossimo anno si ripeta. ;-)