On WordCamp 2008, Cape Town

This morning I attended WordCamp 2008.

I must admit that when I signed up to attend the event I was slightly unsure as to what to expect.

I’m not a “web guy”.  I’m not a graphic designer, or a CSS specialist, or a social-media junkie.

I’m a programmer.  I work in Clarion, and occasionally in C++.  I build custom business applications, and libraries for other software engineers.

That said, I do dabble quite a bit in all of the above, including Drupal and WordPress, which is why I signed up to attend WordCamp 2008.

As I emarrassly admitted a couple of days ago, when I signed up to attend this conference I actually had no idea who Matt Mullenweg was!  For those ignoramuses like myself who may be reading this wondering who Matt is, he’s the guy who invented WordPress.

That’s a pretty HUGE DEAL, hence my decision to use uppercase and bold when I say “HUGE DEAL“.

I got horribly lost trying to find the venue this morning, thanks to a completely useless my (no, it wasn’t my fault for waking up late, it was the map I tell you!).

But luckily I arrived just before the start of Vincent’s session.

But before I get into that, three things jumped out at me when I arrived and took my seat this morning…

1. Most of the 100 attendees were young.  Very young.  At the many programming conferences I’ve attended over the years I’d say the average age is usually about 40.  But the average age of this group was probably 25!  I felt old.  That’s an unusual experience for me.
2. I felt completely at home.  These may have been web-geeks as opposed to code-geeks, but they were still fellow geeks.  Lekker.
3. I don’t think there was a single black person in the room.  Why is that?

Back to Vincent’s session..

On Vincent Maher

Herewith a couple of random notes that I took during Vincent’s session..

• “My blog doesn’t have all that many readers, but they’re high quality readers.” – Vincent.
• “Journalists tend have a certain level of disdain towards non-journalists when it comes to writing on the web.” – Vincent (rough quote)
• “Good software allows for free play within clearly defined limits.” – Vincent on why M&G chose WordPress.
• ThoughtLeader has 7,000,000 words in content (including comments), which has a market value of about R4,000,000.
• Authors / post-submitters are essentially driven by a desire for peer recognition.
• Lesson 1 – Never change the core WordPress code.
• Lesson 2 – When building community based websites 10% of the challenge is related to technical issues, 90% is related to people issues.

On Justin Hartman

Similarly, a couple of random notes that I took during Justin Hartman’s session..

• Justin’s presentation froze momentarily which made me feel really good, seeing that I was quite possibly the only guy in the room who WASN’T using an Apple laptop.
• I took LOADS of notes during the session on stats, architecture, links etc pertaining to the various sites that Justin has worked on.  I’ll write about this in a separate post though.
• Along with WordPress, he’s also a big fan of Joomla.  Am I the only person I know who prefers Drupal to Joomla?
• Justin mentioned several times how difficult it is to get things done when dealing with media people / departments.  Apparently beaurocricy even exists in creative circles.
• Many suits still think that websites need to take 12 – 18 months to design and build “properly”.  Even though we can clearly do it in a fraction of the time (weeks / days) using tools like WordPress. (More on this in a separate post later…)
• “Facebook was so successful because it made social networking accessible.” – Justin.

On Matt Mullenweg

I’ve mentioned several times (now that I’ve been enlightened), Matt invented WordPress.  Seeing that this was a conference all about WordPress, this explains why Matt was the key speaker.  Aaaaaaah..

Herewith some random notes from Matt’s session and interview..

• This was the 7th WordCamp that Matt has attended.  He’s attending 9 more before the end of the year!
• Cape Town generates more traffic to WordPress.com than Joburg.
• As of today, there are 2,871,407 blogs on WordPress.org, and 3,886,667 blogs on WordPress.com!
• The average WordPress blog has 9 installed plugins, 5 of which are active.

Matt also had a LOT to say about the whole WordPress journey, open source, how WordPress.com generates income (the business model), WordPress competitors / clients etc, etc, etc.  I’ll blog about that tomorrow though.