Erica Stephens

“Just throw her in.  She’ll figure it out or she won’t.”  — My Uncle Jon teaching me to swim.

Dave Moyer Attack! by Aaron

It’s important to know that I write this review, and attended this conference, from the point of view of a true beginner.  I’m building my own website (yep, this one!) for myself out of absolute necessity – my ex made my last one, it is years out of date, an artist worth her salt must have a site (especially if her business cards advertise one), and I never liked the original site anyways.  So I’ve decided to go all Big Business meets 9 to 5 and do it for myself.*  I’m an arts professor at UTD so I heard talk about this hoe down floating around campus for a few weeks and finally decided to just throw myself in and see if I floated to the top.

*(Lily Tomlin MADE both of those films.  What a rad, rad lady.)

First, my only real complaint.  The schedule ran over by hours on both days of the event.  Granted I didn’t get any sleep Friday night because of some lovely Word Camp attendees I met that night, so Saturday was going to be miserable for me no matter what.  Nevertheless even the most committed Campers were checking their watches at the end of each day.  I can’t fault the Powers That Be too much for this, though, because it wasn’t due to poor planning on their part.  Rather, the speakers they invited came packed with such an arsenal of info that every one of them went over their allotted time.  So as far as a negative goes, that’s a pretty darn good one.

I think one of the strongest aspects the planners got right was fostering a sense of community amongst the attendees.  This was my first time meeting Jon Pozadzides (and everyone else for that matter), but it seemed like most people there knew him already.  He, Tony Cecala, and Erica O’Grady all came off as the type of people that have never met a stranger.  And though in my real world I’m the wacky, crazy one, I was completely out of my element and played the role of shy and intimidated all weekend.  So it was great that there were a few people who made it their sole mission to talk to and welcome every person that entered their sight line.

There was a meet and greet for the event at a bowling alley the night before the conference began, which was a fabulous idea.  Few things break the ice between strangers more quickly than stinky bowling shoes and beer.  It was at this particular event that I met the group from Austin that graciously allowed me to tag along with them all weekend.  I showed up at the bowling alley not knowing anyone so I approached the first group that seemed the least afraid of new people.  (Plus they were all male and handsome, so that was a pretty big plus.)  And clearly my socializing karma was in full effect because I picked up a 5-7 split (aka a “Woolworth”) at only one beer in.

Bowling and Beer

Still Bowling Still Beering

The tone of the bowling meet and greet carried the attendees through the weekend.  There were smiles all around, punctuated by Jon Pozadzides getting his Cher on by changing outfits every hour.  As to the presentations and the conference, I felt really empowered throughout.  I found that not everything was completely over my head, which shows the mark of a good speaker more than anything else.  I did hear complaints from a few people that the presentations weren’t involved or tech oriented enough, but they’re super nerds and I’m a newbie.  From my standpoint things were just challenging enough (except for that one guy who I really think was speaking in maths because I didn’t understand any of it).

My three favorite presenters, in no particular order:

Getting Beyond Google AdSense by Mark Hopkins

Though I don’t intend to put ads on my site I enjoyed this one a lot.  I spent a few years entrenched in the webcomics world, where every other conversation is about successful business models to make money off of free content, so this presentation was a little like going to a high school football game when your senior-year freshmen have become seniors.   Hopkins focused on the idea of being a “content producer,” and ads being secondary to that.  As the head of my grad program used to tell us, “It doesn’t matter how great an artist you are if you never get around to making anything.”  Ads might work IF your content performs.  Plus Hopkins was the first to break down some of the acronyms that were floating around, so he has a special place in my heart for that.

Extreme Social Media Promotion Hacks by Giovanni Galluci

This guy should have another guy walk behind him at all times with a boombox on his shoulder blasting Rage Against the Machine’s Take the Power Back over and over.  The new Farnsworth Bentley.  He’s New School Old School.  Plus he was the first to spell out what SEO means – Search Engine Optimization.  Let me tell ya, these things make so much more sense when you know what they stand for.  I thought his approach to getting people to your site and making a reputation for yourself was refreshingly simple.  Most important to me was his focus on putting yourself in the shoes of both your audience and your sponsors.  As far as your audience goes, what vocabulary are they using to find you?  What are they looking for?  And as to sponsors, what do you have to offer them?  There’s a whole lot more out there to focus on than just page views.  What an idea!

Multimedia Publishing by Dave Moyer

Dave Moyer by Jennifer Conley

When I was at the bowling meetup on Friday night an adorable youngster came up to me and started talking about and inviting me to a presentation on Sunday.  It went a bit like this:

Him: “I hear there’s this guy talking, D-something, like Don or Dave or-”

Me: “Dean Terry?  Or Dave Parry? They teach here but I don’t think they’re around this weekend.”

Him: “No, it’s like D-….. Dave SOMETHING.”

At this point he’s pointing to his name tag and I’m still not putting one and one together to figure out that he’s talking about himself. I can be so dense sometimes.  Of course I also thought he was 12 and was someone’s son tagging along for the free bowling, so there you go.

So, yes.  Turns out he was the presenter of whom he was speaking, and he was awesome.  He was one of the most engaging speakers of the weekend, and good gravy does he know his stuff.  But rather than talk about his presentation (because I’m convinced in the next four years everyone on earth will know who he is), I’d like to talk about WHY he makes the list of one of my favorites.  Dave Moyer has the most expressive face I’ve ever seen.  My favorite moment of the entire conference, in fact, was sitting in the outcast room where the video from the main conference was streaming live.  On the screen in front of us we saw Dave sitting in front of a screen on the stage that was running a stream of photos from throughout the event.  A photo of Dave making an absurd face came up on the screen, and he was so put off by it that he reacted by making the exact same face.  It was so fabulously meta.  Plus he was sitting next to Matt Mullenweg during the panel discussion and they were dressed in the same little uniform. It was pretty adorable.  I kept waiting for them to cross their legs or their arms in the same way but they never truly echoed each other.  But if I can ever catch Matt Mullenweg making a Dave Moyer face I’m sure my life will be complete.

Twinsies!

Overall Word Camp gets a big happy hug review from me. While it does have some scheduling kinks to work out, I think this event in Dallas is going to grow and benefit from having such a committed behind the scenes group.  I’m straight-up in for Word Camp Dallas 2010.

For a much more intelligent, useful write up of the event, head over to Charles McKeever’s The Open Source Marketer.  And of course you can catch up on what you may have missed at http://dallas.wordcamp.org/

Friday Night Hookah - Look at me mainlining that coffee at 1am. Saturday's attention span never had a chance. William appears to already be asleep. Also, Manoj needs to set the clock on his camera.