I was not meant to attend these types of events.
In fact, within the first hour of listening to one of the presenters, I made a fool of my friend and myself. We waved at someone’s web cam and distracted the presenter. :/ My bad. A lot of the topics were over the head of the personal blogger that I am, so I spent way too much time finishing up on work and giggling to myself about all the folks in front of me with their screens on Twitter [self included]. I won’t say that there weren’t ANY relevant presentations because there WERE. Here was the USER track:
* The Future of Education and WordPress
* SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make – Stephan Spencer
* Open Source Business Models – Stephen O’Grady
* LOLcats and the Secret of Virality – Ben Huh
* WordPress & Microformats – Tantek Celik
* Switching to WordPress Painlessly – Lloyd Budd
* 450 WordPress Power User Tips – Lorelle VanFossen
* Hassle-free Upgrades – Sam Bauers
* State of the Word – Matt Mullenweg
* Get Friendly with BuddyPress – Andy Peatling
* Democratizing the Web through Global Voices – Jeremy Clarke
* An interview with Om Malik
* Riding the Crazyhorse – Liz Danzico and Jane Wells
* Kicking Ass and Creating Passionate Users – Kathy Sierra
Honestly though, I’ve always been rather quiet and shy. I was only comfortable being there as a volunteer and then later hanging out with a good friend. If I had attended alone, I might’ve been up in a corner, wondering what I was doing there. I’m totally self-conscious. It sucks. It won’t change.
There were a few takeaways from WordCamp:
* Apture – a linking platform for the web. You’ll see it in action above with the links to Wikipedia and various Powerpoint presentations. It doesn’t work in my LJ feed or Sage or Google Reader! It’s useful for throwing in a little bubble of information about the topic without actually changing the post. For all other links that require a little clicking, I’m sticking to the old-fashioned way because I haven’t figured out if I can get the links to open as a new window/tab, essentially mirroring the effect of “target=’_blank’” – anyone?
* Absolute Comments – a comment manager plug-in for WordPress that you can use to respond to comments directly from the Dashboard. Hello, USEFUL! I got pretty stoked learning about this one, even though I’m sure many already know about it… If only I could get Akismet to stop picking my comments up as spam! Hahaha.
I may attend again next year. We shall see. I’ve always been interested in this stuff, so maybe if I’m a bit more involved, it’ll make a little more sense. Maybe not.
Edit: I’ve found out that when one clicks on the little Apture pop-up bubble, you can get a new tab or window if you click on the TOP of the bubble. Hooray!
Another year, another WordCamp. Once again, I was a volunteer. Woke up early on a Saturday morning to sign volunteers and Automatticians in. I think the day went well overall. I knew more people this year than last, which was very nice. Similar to last year, only some of the talks were relevant to me. 
