Tag: Wordcamp2007
WordCamp 2007 was sort of weak
Some of the speakers were very interesting, especially Dave Winer, but overall the 2007 WordCamp was a bit of a letdown for me.
[My blog posts about WordCamp are here; Webshots albums here; Flickr photos here.]
WordCamp 2007 – A crowd lines up to see Google's Matt Cutts after his talk
Wordcamp live music apparently not licensed under GPL
It seems that WordCamp 2007, an open source software gathering, is no refuge from intellectual property thuggery. Watch this movie as Andy Skelton fairly exudes greed as he lunges to claim and monetize other people’s recordings after what was billed on the schedule as a mere “musical interlude.” Actually, I would have included the actual song in the movie too without a second thought–but it sucked.
The behavior on display is strangely grandiose in this case (e.g. the joke about whether it’s a “trillion-dollar song” or the belief that people want to feature bad acoustic frat music on their blog), but I’m afraid that it nonetheless could have a real chilling effect on the free exchange of ideas and information about such events.
The key quote from Andy Skelton from the movie:
“I just want a piece of..of your pie!”
To which I say–never!
Wordcamp 2007 – day 2 – photos
WordCamp 2007 – day 2 – Dave Winer
Dave Winer gave a very astute overview of some interesting questions facing WordPress and the overall open source community. Here are my notes from the session:
Dave Winer: “A blog is one person’s voice.”
“Some people say, if it doesn’t have comments it’s not a blog. That’s not true.”
2 forms of blogging
–rss title link description metadata(categories) – each blog post is an essay unto itself
–linkblogging/human aggregation(??)/microblogging (not different from linkblogging??)“I wanted to fit in with the Netvibes/Pageflakes..” wih his RSS feed for his scripting.com blog.
“I love Twitter”
“Future-safe archives”
what about that Feedburner article (note)
open source ID sysem“open source Twitter” — “look at the Twitter API–how can that be replicated?”
“I don’t understand Facebook…I have to accept it that people like it…don’t like that it’s a walled garden”
Wordcamp 2007 – day 1 – the nightcap
Thanks for the few hours of open bar tonight at Lucky 13, WordPress–it’s a nasty bar but the Guinness at least tasted real–well as real as any Guinness made in Canada can taste anyway.
People really start ripping into Perl after a few beers it seems.
WordCamp2007 – day 1 – afternoon session
In the WordCamp Saturday afternoon session Google employee Matt Cutts gave a talk about “white hat” search engine optimization–he covered a lot of stuff but he also said that he wasn’t sure if he could get today’s PowerPoint cleared for release on his blog. So for now, here’s a tip about AdSense that I found interesting–if I copied it down right, here’s the way to emphasize your actual content as opposed to having AdSense scan your whole site:
adsense tags–put the ad-relevant info between these:
<!– google_ad_section_start –>
—
<!– google_ad_section_end –>
Wordcamp 2007 – day 1 – morning session
A series of horrid shrieks emerged from the peanut gallery as the cry went up–“The Internet is down!!” Presenter Dan Kuykendall tried bravely to joke about it–“of course the Internet is going to go down”–but the crowd assembled for WordCamp 2007 at the Swedish-American Hall was slowly giving over to fear and panic. What in the hell happened to the Internet?
Well it appears that some sort of depraved freak from off the street had busted in and wandered upstairs, and with crumbs from a scone snagged downstairs still rolling off his chin tried to rip apart the wiring tangle around the Cisco router in order to harvest its copper. I tried to sound the alarm but in the tussle was pushed into the table, and right after that the connections went down.
So fortunately no copper was stolen by the madman (only a scone or two) and as he turned to leave down the stairs I stuck a WordPress sticker onto the back of his filthy Members Only jacket– so keep an eye out. Internet connection was restored after some time, although it was clear that the staffer talking on the phone about how to fix it was no CCNA because he was still working on it for three minutes after the Internet had returned and only stopped messing with the decrepit old router when told to by an associate.
I’ll write some updates if anything else interesting happens–and if I don’t write anything else then there’s only one logical assumption about that. Also don’t forget to check my photo album from this morning’s WordCamp on Webshots. Here’s a photo that was snapped just before all that craziness with the Internet happened.
Wordcamp 2007
The 2nd annual Wordcamp event is happening in San Francisco this weekend. Jessica and I are planning to attend.
Some are voicing their concerns about WordPress upgradability and security issues over the last year, which is a matter that needs to be addressed.
What I’m interested in is how WordPress will deal with the range of competitive threats in the self-hosted blog/CMS market, all the way from Gelato self-hosted tumbleblogs to an upcoming open source Movable Type version to new versions of smaller competitors like B2Evolution.