Event

What: WordCamp Chicago

Where: UBS Tower, Chicago, IL

When: June 6th – 7th, 2009

Why: WordPress organizes conferences all over to world to bring people together and connect on their passion and interest in WordPress, an amazing website and blogging platform.

Website: http://wordcampchicago.com

Twitter Name: @wordcampchicago

Twitter HashTag: #wcchicago

WordCamp

Based on Barcamp, WordPress is just plain awesome.  Here’s the description from the main site:

WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other. WordCamps are open to WordPress.com and WordPress.org users alike.

Venue

The UBS Tower was a great location!  It was spacious, well lit, good room temperature with a nearby coffee shop.  The UBS Tower is in downtown Chicago and I had no trouble getting to it.

Upon entering, there was a signup table where I picked up my nametag.  The Serverbeach guys were there as a sponsor and maybe to answer questions about WordPress hosting?

The schawg table was nice!  Skype decided to sponsor this WordCamp so everyone got a free headset which came with 30 minutes of free Skype calls.  I love Skype and have been using it for my business since 2006.  There were also plenty of wordpress buttons and stickers.

There were circular tables with room for 8 people or so.  The stage was located near the windows and the presentations showed up well on the large projection screen.

The sound was great and I could hear all the speakers clearly although the ones that made jokes held my attention better!

There was fresh coffee, doughnuts, fruit and juice for breakfast both Saturday and Sunday.  We  enjoyed a great lunch spread of sandwiches, salad, pasta and chocolate brownie “things” with plenty more coffee and soda.  I don’t know if there were vegetarian options because I like to eat meat.

Hotel

I stayed at the Holiday Inn Chicago Mart Plaza hotel; one of the hotels indicated on the WordCamp Chicago FAQ.

The WordCamp Chicago website was great because the FAQ page had all the information I needed to pick out a hotel.  It listed several near the venue and indicated their distance along with all their contact information.  I picked the closest one assuming most other attendees would but it turned out most folks were from the Chicago area!

Getting to the hotel is confusing as it’s located inside the Mart Plaza building.  You enter, see someone at a desk who looks very uninterested in their job (or your) and you need to go past them to the elevators and turn left.  There is no signage.

Check-in went fine and they put me in room that had this great view!  Reading reviews on various websites, it sounds like some floors have been remodeled and the gal checking me in said said the 23rd floor was one of these floors.

Normally, I think of the Holiday Inn as a hotel you don’t want to spend too much time in but there were not kids running down the halls or loud music so I got to relax and enjoy some quiet time.

I watched a lot of Discovery channel shows in the hotel room Friday night because that’s just something you do.

Interestingly, there was a show on how plane crashes are often the result of cumulative errors – a series of problems that alone would not cause a plane to crash but together create a recipe for disaster.  Malcolm Gladwell talks about plane crashes in his book, “The Outliers” when explaining how Bill Gates, The Beatles and hockey players become successful due a series of cumulative advantages.

They also have this “pillow service” where you can order different types of pillows so they are trying to be like the NYC hotels.  I took them up on this and ordered an additional down pillow.

I didn’t eat in the hotel or order room service so no opinion.

Hotel Rating: 3 Stars

Would I stay here again?  Yes

Travel

I flew in on American Airlines.  I got to the airport early and for the first time ever, I didn’t check any luggage.  I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to bring my electric toothbrush through TSA so I asked on Twitter what people thought about it.  Watch out when Googling for “electric toothbrush” because it seems to slang for vibrator!

I’d been talking about bringing Bluey along but once I saw it was $150 each way to bring a small Chihuahua along, I told her she was staying put!

At the airport, I scored a tasty Iced Mint Mocha sample at Caribou Coffee as pictured here.  Yum!

I bought myself a new book especially for this trip, Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works, and proceeded to read, read, read.

The plane didn’t crash since I’m writing this although we did experience turbulence on the way back and I wondered if anyone else on the plane had watched the Discovery channel show about plane crashes…

I made the mistake of taking the Airport Express shuttle service from the O’Hare airport.  It was completely horrible and by the time it arrived at the hotel, I was sure I was going to lose my stomach.  The ride was bumpy (an understatement), the driver kept smashing on the breaks so the passengers were being pitched forward and worst of all he kept side swiping cars.  I was sure he was going to get into an accident.  I tried to go to my “special place” and not think about it.   Once at my hotel, I called Airport Express to tell them about my experience.  I paid $50 for a round-trip ticket.

Will I use Aiport Express again?  Hell No

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I took cabs while I was in Chicago.  Street parking was abundant but expensive from what the locals said.  It’s also a drag if you park downtown or at a hotel because you can expect to spend upwards of $18 a day.

Speakers

Liz Strauss

I liked Liz because she didn’t use any fancy technology for her presentation.  In fact, she joked about “Pencil and Paper Camp” like BarCamp.  She told the tale of how she started her blog in July of 2005 and she learned how to interact with her visitors by leaving room for people to contribute…like saying, “Bacon and ….(eggs, your blog visitors would say”.  She talked about writing for comments which I very much agreed with as I’ve observed this phenomenon on Chris Brogan’s blog where within minutes, he has over 20 replies on a post.

“What you want to be known for is what you should write about”, said Liz.  I found her to be funny, sincere and reflective of her live in the “blogosphere”.

Doug Hanna

This guy is from Automattic, WordPress’ parent company.  He runs the WordPress showcase where you can see all the amazing implementations of WordPress.  I wasn’t sure what Doug was going to talk about but it ended up being a great presentation.  The one thing that stuck was he said WordPress suffered from “Functional Fixedness” and that’s when a person, product or service is only seen for something very specific and narrow.  It seemed much like the plight of WordPress was one of stereotypes just like Brown people and women deal with everyday.  Doug then took us through the showcase and featured a bunch of famous folks who had websites or blogs running on WordPress.  I wish Doug had spent more time on WPMU and Buddypress installs.

Jeremy Wright

Jeremy had the funniest intro where he talked about “things you may not know about him” including how he sleeps with 3 pillows and that no one was welcome to check on his pillow arrangement by knocking on his hotel room door!  He runs B5 media which is a blogging network.  They bring in revenue through advertisers who pay to post ads on their site.  B5 retains a small army of opinionated bloggers who post on everything under the sun.  I was happy to hear that they provide opportunities for the bloggers to provide feedback.  B5 almost lost their shirt because they were maintaining 350 individual blogs so maintenance was a nightmare.  With the help of @photomatt and Automattic, they migrated to a single instances of WPMU (WordPress Multi-User) and now enjoy streamlined blog administration!  I started my first “real” blog in May 2008 and soon realized I didn’t want to go down the path of maintaining multiple blogs so I completed my first WPMU install sometime last summer.  I now run my clients blogs on WPMU as well unless I have a good reason not to.  Another thing Jeremy mentioned is that by switching to Brian Gardner/Studiopress’ Lifestyle theme, B5 saw a 60% reduction in bandwidth.  Jeremy said it’s important to keep their bloggers happy and then talked a bit about how they find new bloggers…mainly word of mouth.  Great speaker!

Erin Blaskie

I was not liking Erin’s presentation.  It seemed very MLM (Multi Level Marketing) and all about her being a “Social Media Expert”.  She promoted her business and talked about how she got into…I’m not sure because it was really not that interesting.  A lot of it sounded like recycled tweets and she had a very heavy “Valley Girl” accent.

Micah Baldwin

This was my favorite speaker at the whole entire conference!  Micah made a great joke at the beginning, “I started a blog on weight loss but as you can see, that didn’t work” and then launched into a sincere and authentic overview of why it’s important to bring your brand back to your blog.  He shared about his entry into blogging and how he thought only writers wrote but after blogging a bit, he realized he liked writing too!  He supported the idea of blogging when you have that really good idea in your head rather than waiting.  I’ve been there so many times where I scribble down a “To Blog” note and later find the enthusiasm to fill it out into an article gone.  He touched on his personal struggles with bipolar and really just brought it home with many great quotables:

“Influence is influencing one person about one thing”

“Trust, Expertise, Brand”

“Personal branding is about creating expectations about you  and your actions”

“Knowledge is gained, expertise is given”

“Become a conduit”

“Comments are social capital”

“I didn’t know I enjoyed writing until I became a blogger”

Micah talked about his friend Drew who had cancer and started a website with Twitter hashtag #blamedrewscancer where you can say it’s Drew’s cancer that made you wake up late.  It’s a fundraising effort as well as being both healing, humorous and connective.  I pulled up the site and it looks like Drew was diagnosed with cancer May 20th, 2009 . .

Micah also shared about his company, Lijit.  I didn’t really understand what it did or why I needed to use it but his last slide caught my eye as it said something to the effect, “Install Lijit and them email me for something special”.  Now that just left me plain curious so last week I installed Lijit last week and now have a better understanding that it’s  an alternative search and indexing engine for blogs.  I emailed Micah this week so we’ll see what happens.  I guess it’s not so bad to do a write up a week or two after attending an event as you have a chance to followup on things.

David Dalka

There were some good points in here but it was hard to digest because @dalka didn’t add in a jokes, humor or give the audience a chance to get to know him.  The things I took away were mostly quotes:

“Always have  a bias for action”

“Transform legacy budgets”

“The cost of receiving an organic visitor is nearly $0.00″

He urged us to review our search terms and to utilize slideshare for presentations.  After Day 1 of WordCamp Chicago, I ended up talking with @dalka and got to listen to how search could be optimized and that it was a systematic process that most people overlook.

Kevin Palmer

This presentation was about branding everything that was yours.  There were some points about researching the competition, making sure to put an intro clip in your videos so people knew what they were watching and to start slowly when entering social media.

NOTE: I overslept on Sunday so I missed all the speakers except the last one, Matt Mullenweg.

Matt Mullenweg

This is the guy who founded WordPress and then the parent company, Automattic.    Matt has a goofy and endearing smile.  He said they call WordPress.com, “the gateway drug”.  I was really glad to attend the WordCamp event because Matt shared with us the story of how WordPress came to be.  He was using some blogging software (gasp!  not WordPress?) called B2 and the developer, Michelle, had been steadily developing it.  Michelle lived in France although I don’t know how it affects the story except that maybe it helped open up Matt’s eyes that collaboration on software could be a worldwide thing.  Anyway, Michelle goes MIA and Matt is wondering aloud on his “blog” what will happen to B2 when this commenter named Mike says, “Let’s branch it off and keep it going” (or close to that).  So they get to work, figuring out how to upload to Sourceforge and version control releases.  That was January 27th, 2003.  Michelle returns to the scene, joins in the fun and WordPress comes to be!

Matt talked about GPL as it related to the themes directory at WordPress.org and licensing for developers who make all the cool looking stuff we slide over our blogs so they reflect a bit of us.  He covered WordPress.tv, the new location WordPress launched to centralize videos from WordCamps and tutorials on WordPress.  I’m happy to say I just got notified one of my videos was published at WordPress.tv!  He then talked about this amazingly cool thing called “Taxonomy” in which WordPress 2.8 would have event better support for these custom classification fields.  He talked about using taxonomy for photos and I was just so intrigued I promised myself I would google it once I got back to Minneapolis.

“We’re all digital share croppers”, Matt said.  That is why it was important to have a blog, a space you owned.  There are upcoming developments for the iPhone and Blackberry including a new version of the iPhone WordPress app.   I have the current one and it’s quite hard to use.

“The social aspects began to accelerate the development of BuddyPress”

“Themes you can trust”

Matt talked about more stuff which I will continue in a second post as I have to finish packing as I am heading back to Chicago this weekend for another blogging event, BloggingWhileBrown

Attendees

Interesting mix of attendees.  I was really happy to see so many curious folks who had taken it upon themselves to attend and learn about WordPress.

There were some obvious marketing folks who wanted nothing to do with you unless you were buying something.  They would be all friendly with people and as soon as they realized you weren’t going to buy their SEO services, they acted like certain people became invisible.  This was my first time observing this systematic invisibility cloak but it sounds like it’s happening more and more at these events.

The good news is people came out and filled up the event and there was curiosity, interest and excitement from the crowd.  It seemed most folks were from Chicago (50% or more).   There were also quite a lot of women which I’m noticing happens at blog focused events.

New in WordPress 2.8

Taxonomy
Built in editor (no version control yet)
Add themes from Dashboard

Plugins

YARPP

Twitmeme

Twitter Tools

Websites to check out

Lijit

Slideshare

Meetups

After day 1, people either headed home or went to the agreed upon meetup at Mortensen’s.  Since we have one in Minneapolis, I didn’t see the need to drop $60 on a steak dinner as the blog post for WordCamp Chicago warned:

Saturday June 6th – the official WordCamp Chicago meetup is at Morton’s Steakhouse at 6:00 for dinner/drinks. 65 E Wacker Place – Chicago.  It’s about 5 minutes from the UBS Tower Center.  Big thanks to Liz Strauss for working to reserve a special room for us at Morton’s!  Come for drinks – stay for dinner!  (note: if staying for dinner, expect to spend approx. $40 – 60 per person, on average)

I just had some tall and refreshing Guinesses’ and spent time getting to know attendees better.

Next Time

Spend more time in Chicago.  For the event organizers, they should have a method to test, monitor and throttle the wireless bandwidth.  I brought a Moleskine city notebook with me that I customized with felt lettering but many other folks brought laptops.  Since the internet wasn’t working, they couldn’t really do much.  I think it looks rude to be tippy typing away while someone is presenting but that’s me.  I had access via my iPhone to tweet and happily took notes.