I feel like a fish out of water because of the all the people who spend tremendous amounts of hours studying, developing and designing specifically for WordPress

The reason why that is so, is for the fact that although I enjoy learning more about the amazing structure and the way it all works, my passion is in the design phase and making sure it all works the way I conceptualize it all in my head.

The truth of it all is that this is more of a hobby that turned to business…just simply fun! As the old saying goes, if you are not having fun doing what you do, then why are you doing it.

As I sit here at Phoenix Word Camp convention #PhxWC I really can see that most of the seats being filled in a totally sold camp…pretty cool!

9:15am – the convention starts with a renown blogger Lorelle VanFossen – considered one of the top bloggers, and women bloggers, in the world. She is the host of the Lorelle on WordPress, providing WordPress and blogging tips for bloggers of all levels, and a contributor to the popular blogging news source, Blog Herald. She did a delightful job in her presentation, but the content was “so-so”. She mostly gave pointers on how to blog really fast! She stated that she posts some ridiculous amounts of articles per day, per month, per year…it was pretty amazing…all in all a good presentation.

9:45am – Dave Moyer – a podcast talented kid (20 something…) who began his speech fairly quickly and was off stage with only a few mentions of how I can make my blog better with podcasting…which in the end, I am not that big on, so I was wondering anyhow…

10:15am – Jim Christian from goDaddy – came on the scene and told of some powerful resources that can assist in the Search Engine Optimization of websites. Talked a lot about WhiteHat, GrayHat and BlackHat methods. Although most bloggers are GrayHat Optimizers, the fact that anything other than WhiteHat is frowned upon by the search engines, hampers that style a bit.

11:00am – Matt Mullenweg and a couple other guys (doesn’t really matter at this point) – founder of WordPress. He went into the next update for WordPress, 2.9. It will have many of those little annoyances taken out and debugged. 2.9 will also feature some pretty nifty opportunities to create advanced plugins from scratch and possibly a better WYSIWYG editor too! The fact that Matt was talking about the powers of WordPress, how it all started and where it has grown to (and where it will not grow to), was simply amazing. He did a great job in explaining the pains and struggles WordPress currently operates under and how to overcome those. The statement that he made about the underlying code maintaining the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE and deters away from those that wish to build upon it without offering the same license, was him staying true to what WordPress has been and will continue to be about. That was a refreshing statement to say the least.

1:15pm – Jason Cote – Power of WordPress – although the content of the message here was good, the delivery was not all that great. I felt like I needed to go up to Jason and tell him to stop trying so hard. He mostly wanted to get the message across that by utilizing a blog with WordPress, you can reach tons of people and have your voice heard, but walk with caution because a bad reputation will take you down faster than the rise of a good one.

1:45pm – John Hawkins came on the scene and showed everyone how easy it actually is to build a WordPress plugin. This was a great presentation and I found myself jotting down a ton of notes. The sample he made there can be downloaded here or directly from here.

2:15pm – Merlin Mann – Social Media – The Minority Report – Merlin is known for his off-color bites and jabs at those who seem to be the hot topic in today’s social media marketplace. He went on to talk about how your personal brand is a reflection of the true you. This message inspired me to write the 80/20 rule post of earlier.
Great message and awesome presentation. This guy came out with a TV stand-up advertisement paper that he managed to scribble some outline notes on the back of – which he took from the hotel room by the way. His delivery of the message was classy, yet funny all at the same time. When he first stepped onto the stage, my expectations were not what was presented to me, and he made it easy to like him, overall wonderful job.

There were a couple others after Merlin – one was a designer (strictly design – no code)- Brent Spore whatabloger.com and the other was a Video Blogging and Video Marketing dude –
Clintus McGintus idoitdigital.com.
Both are good at what they do, but need some work in presentation of such. Although I did take a few notes from Brent, Clintus had some great tips on video within blogs…

All in all it was a great day!