After letting the information digest for a solid day, I thought I would revisit my notes, video, and thoughts of the day and put down in writing what I felt were the biggest and most important ideas session by session.
Tim Ferriss - Scalable Blogging, Author of “The 4-hour Workweek ”
Tim is a thinker, a constant tester, he likes to analyze what works and what doesn’t work. He uses CrazyEgg on his blog . Best traffic days are Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. He posts 1 to 2 times a week. Biggest hint was to change the label for “Categories” to “Topics”, results in much greater stickyness.
Favorite WP Plugin: Redirection
Uses Slinkset.com , Evernote.com and Google Keyword Tool . Ignores SEO for first draft. Follow Tim on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tferriss
I had a chance to talk to Tim and asked him to say hi to my friend John Harper. Tim is always one of the nicest guys you’ll meet.
Matt Cutts – Straight from Google
Matt is head of the Anti Spam Department of Google and all around Google Ambassador and good guy. Matts presentation was entitled simply, “How to do better in Google” Right off the bat he mentioned Video!
Google will crawl the higher PR pages deeper and more often. Matt explained the idea behind PageRank (I learned that the Page in PageRank stood for Larry Page). “PR is determined by the number of people that link to you and how important they are.”
- “You want to be both Relevant and Reputable” .
- Also recommended the Google Keyword Tool to identify better keywords to use naturally within your post.
- Do not use a permalink structure like
http://AreWeConnected.com/?p=123 instead use one in which you can use keywords.
- Categories should be Keywords as well.
Blog: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
Twitter: @mattcutts
Here’s his presentation: http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=ddvhbrqf_126gc346qdh
Want to foil most all hacking attempts? Slide 48 is all you need!
If you weren’t paying attention you might have missed this nugget:
Matt Mullenweg – State of the Word
Matt, if you don’t know, is the person we can all thank for having WordPress. He’s that pink square up in my header image. He is a charming speaker with so much to cover in such a short time.
Blog: http://ma.tt/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/photomatt
Tara Hunt – Author of “The Whuffie Factor ”
I’ve written about Whuffie before. Tara first explained what is meant by Whuffie and then generally went down her 5 items detailed in her book on building Whuffie. In case you haven’t read her book here’s a quick bullet point list.
- Turn the Bullhorn Around (listen)
- Become a part of the community you serve.
- Create amazing customer experiences (Automagicness)
- Embrace the Chaos
- Find your higher purpose
Blog: http://www.horsepigcow.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/MissRogue
Phillip Greenspun - ummmmmmm
MIT, big thinker of lofty subjects, and the strangest presentation I have ever seen. Best thing I can do here is to recommend you go read http://geekporngirl.com/2009/05/31/does-the-internet-make-us-smaller-report-from-wordcamp-sf/ to maybe understand a little of what happened. Somewhere, lost in the middle of it all was a really excellent thought on relational database and search relevancy.
Chris Pirillo – Community
I have known Chris since the TechTV days. His presentation was passionate yet seemed unrehearsed and almost seemed like a collection of thoughts assembled from other projects and compiled as he was going.
He did have one great line that I saw tweeted and ReTweeted. “A blog is just a tool. And if you think that a blog is a community than you too are a tool!"
Blog: http://chris.pirillo.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/chrispirillo
Cali Lewis – GeekBrief.TV
Always energetic, she has the perfect personality for TV. Cali offered up 7 rules for building an audience.
- Establish and know your Core Value.
- Start compelling conversations.
- Be an Asset (add value).
- Make Friends not Fans.
- Reward participation thru giveaways and appreciation.
- Take a break. Give the audience a chance to miss you.
- Always be updating / always improving.
Blog: http://www.geekbrief.com/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/calilewis
All in all this by far was the best event I have been to for the money. I caught up with some old friends and met some new ones. If a WordCamp comes to your area – and even if it doesn’t, you owe it to yourself to be there!
Thanks Ma.tt for everything you do!
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Cool stuff. I have a couple more tabs open to go explore now.
And the WPMU/BuddyPress/bbPress Forum integration is giving me a headache...