Archive for Tag ‘Boston‘

Podcamp Boston 6

Made it in Saturday for the opening of Podcamp Boston 6. (After a few working weekends in a row, I couldn’t do two full days so I just came in for Saturday morning).

While I was only able to catch three sessions, each would have been worth the trip on it’s own. All three were led by dynamic, engaging, even charismatic presenters who clearly know their stuff and know the Podcamp audience.

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Podcamp Boston This Weekend

Podcamp Boston (6) is this weekend (Sept. 24th and 25th) at the Microsoft NERD center.

Here’s the schedule (which they haven’t yet published except as a google doc):

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Boston 140 Characters Conference succeeds despite coffee, wifi, power fail

The Fail Whale in Legos - Photo by Bjarne Panduro Tveskov - http://www.flickr.com/photos/tveskov/3387394098/

The 140 Characters Conference in Boston yesterday started off with three strikes against it, in my mind:

  1. No coffee. I’ve greatly cut back on my own caffeine addiction, but who starts a conference at 9am on a Tuesday and doesn’t serve coffee?
  2. No wifi. Well, there was Wifi, but I couldn’t ever get on any of the available networks.
  3. No power. Well, there was power in the building, but the power cops facilities people from the venue would not allow attendees to plug in to the wall outlets, as the cords crossing the aisle represented some kind of hazard.

That’s a steep uphill climb for any conference to overcome, but it turned out to be well worth it. The saving grace was not just Boston’s always active, engaging, welcoming, and supportive social media community (as embodied in folks like @pistachio, Chris Brogan, C.C. Chapman, CS Penn, and way too many more to name them all) but also excellent editorial curation and content pacing.

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WordCamp NYC, WPBook, WordCamp Boston

Here’s the slides from my presentation this morning at WordCamp NYC. It was in the “beginning developer” track so I tried to focus on the overall structure of how the plugin does what it does and the hooks/actions/filters used.

Hard to fit the talk into 30 minutes with time for questions and roadmap – there’s so much more I want WPBook to do – hopefully I can find the time soon.

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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.

WordCampNYC – Nov 14-15

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.

wcb

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.