WordCamp NYC, WordCamp Boston

I’m very happy to note I will be attending, volunteering at, and speaking at WordCamp NYC, coming up in November 14th and 15th.

My talk is one of the Saturday Sessions in the Beginning Developer track. (Hopefully not a rating of my development skills as evidenced by the plugin’s code, but reflecting the intended audience).

Here’s a quick blurb:

You Got Your WordPress in My Facebook!: Developing WPBook. WPBook is a plugin that enables users to turn their self-hosted WordPress blog into a Facebook application. Full web posts are viewable within the Facebook context, including embedded multimedia. Users can comment using their Facebook identity, and comments (and comment threads) are shared between Facebook users and regular blog readers. WPBook uses a deceptively simple set of actions and filters, along with the Facebook API, to create a relatively high degree of integration. In this talk I’ll go over the basics of how WPBook works, the current challenges in terms of meeting user requests, and some of the solutions currently in development.

WordCamp NYC looks to be an amazing production: good location, large crowd, and a solid group of speakers, including a Sunday keynote from Matt Mullenweg himself. Tickets are still available but I would not be at all surprised to see this sell out, so register now.

I’m also leading the organization for the first-ever WordCamp Boston, on January 23rd, 2010. We’ll be hosted at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development center, which is a fantastic venue right in Kendall Square.

Tickets aren’t on sale yet, but there is an announcements google group if you want to be notified when they do go on sale, and an organizers google group if you want to help put the event together. There’s also a design contest for the logo (enter by November 11th please!). I expect to open a call for speakers shortly.

Given all the interest I’ve seen and heard around Boston from end-users, SEO and affiliate marketing folks, developers, and businesses small and large in WordPress as a platform (including .com and .org), I suspect WordCamp Boston will sell out as well – so sign up for the announcements list if you think you’d like to attend.

Future of Media, Video WTF

Two quick notes on media:

1. Paul Gillin: “The Future of Media is: Small, Aggregated, Inclusive, Community-driven, Conversational, Fast, Flexible, Experimental.”

2. New from the PCF: Video WTF?

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Inbound Marketing, Outbound Marketing, and Spam: #IMS09 day one

Yesterday was day one for the Inbound Marketing Summit (see #ims09 for tweetstream) at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough. If you’ll allow me an early morning extended metaphor, it reminded me an aspect of Boston public transit: the distinction between inbound and outbound, and how they can get confused.

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It’s Not [Just] About Your Site: Managing Your Digital Footprint

One of the core aspects of the assembled web is the concept that brands and all companies need to think more broadly about their presence. It isn’t just their web site, or even their network of 10, 20, or 200 sites for various products, services, and brands.

It’s about your digital footprint: the sum total of all the interactions your customers, prospective customers, fans, antagonists, employees, suppliers, and partners have with your content and services throughout the entire Internet.
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Free as in What, Exactly?

Free Software advocates have for a long time worked to draw a distinction between free of cost (“Free as in Beer”) and free of restrictions (“Free as in Speech” or as I prefer “Free as in Freedom”). The challenge stems from the fact that we use, in idiomatic English, the same word “Free” to refer to both concepts, whereas in romance languages (based on latin) there’s a clearer distinction between gratis and libre.

Optaros Beer, which was free as in freedom but not as in beer

Of course, as r0ml pointed out in a masterful OSCON presentation in 2008, we do have a corresponding word in English to libre – Liberal, or Liberty. Maybe if we’d been calling it “Liberty Software” or “Freedom Software” all these years there’d be less FUD.

Two recent posts crossed my blog reader on the challenge of value versus cost. Now that so many content creators are taking approaches similar to free software via unconferences and creative commons licenses, we need to remember that “free” in these case does not mean without value and does not have to mean without cost.
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