thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

In February I was fortunate enough to be part of a dual  event held in Wellington, NZ and a week later in Melbourne.

As one of the NZ organisers we curated a number of talks on what WordPress users are doing here; as well as how they do some of that. All of the talks were good and a number of links and photos from Wellington are to be found over here.

I really enjoyed a panel discussion on the future of blogging & related matters which featured David Farrar of Kiwiblog, John Ford of Automattic, Julie Starr from Evolving Newsroom, Richard MacManus of RWW and Lance Wiggs.

Some of that was captured on video and other notes were scribbled down. I’m hoping to write up some of those key quotes when I get a moment.

What I particularly liked is the idea that you can invite a little chaos into the process and so I was delighted when DiscourseNZ duo – Ben Gracewood and Morgan Nichol agreed to come along and give a taster of their show. It was an excellent end to the day.

On Sunday we had some more hands on sessions and finished with a ukelele trio called the Custom Post Types who sang a song about CSS called the curly bracket blues. Really you had to be there

A week later I was in Melbourne for WordCamp Melbourne. It was a great event with a full range of presentations – many of whom were recorded on video – well done guys.

The video archive for #wcmelb is over here at Blip TV

As with any event like these it was very useful to hear people approaching many of the same topics from different perspectives and sharing those experiences.

At the event was Kym Huynh from WordCast who recorded a short talk with me. Ironically it lasted about 8 mins and I later did a 5 minute lighting talk covering some of the same ideas in the main room.

There was no script and it is always a little scary to see one self on video but I reckon it turned out well. I’m sure Kym did some great editing in there. (Thanks Kym)

Were you at WordCampNZ in Wellington on Feb 19th & 20th or WordCamp Melbourne on Feb 26th & 27th. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

At WordCampNZ I was planning to talk about what I do most of the time which is online marketing projects integrated with WordPress.

On the day I talked more about the logistics around WordCamp rather than the stats & case studies I had planned to do.

My business is focussed at the marketing end of the scale and so I use email tools especially Campaign Monitor and MailChimp plus various other social media plugins to make it as easy as possible for customers and partners to engage with each other.

Again not having enough time (or sleep) I mentioned these WordPress plugins in passing.

This is the partly the presentation that I had planned but on the day it seemed more important to go wider and talk about WordCampNZ future planning.

1. Google Analyticator is one of my favourite plugins as it gives a rolling 30 day view of GA on the WordPress dashboard. This saves going into the google account which not many of my customers want to do. The plugin has role settings and so that desktop widget can be rolled down to below admin and editors if that is what you want to do.
2. FB Like is Facebook like plugin that we use on WordcampNZ. I like it (sorry about the pun.) Much as I personally have mixed views about Facebook (privacy & commerce) there is no doubting the huge clout it has when someone that you know likes or comments on stuff we all care about. (see also my post from June 06 Trust & verify on trust cues.)
3. Backtype Connect is another plugin that is used extensively to feed in the twitter and other social streams into blogs. Part of the reason we use it is that it provides some twitter analytics which is a growing area of interest for many businesses. Have a look at these analytics for the post on Richard Hollingnum.The other reason I / we use Backtype is that some of the automattic people invested in it. (P.s you may need to setup a free account with Backtype if you can’t see the full set of stats)
4. In passing I also referred to VaultPress for backups and VideoPress for video hosting also very much worth checking them out.
5. WordPress Mobile Edition plugin from Alex King is one of my favourites. I don’t mind reading the instructions as there is a theme part and a plugin part. So this plugin needs a FTP whiz to do upload. Auto install won’t get the theme part in the right location.

The other point to remember with these kinds of lists is that plugin versions and WordPress versions are a moving target and do change.

This means that – as always there might be a particular combination of versions that may not work with your theme or other setup configuration.

Congrats to Bill Bennett for his piece on Writing for the web in 300 words one of my favourites and now I’ve just hit 482 so time to publish.

One of the best jobs I ever had was Research & Analysis Director for a merchant banking company back in the early ’90s. Until then it hadn’t really occurred to me that I could get paid for thinking as work.

My current business tagline is “thinking & planning for marketing success”.

Consequently my wardrobe is mostly t-shirts with think or something similar written on them.

At #wordcampnz 2010 there was a serendipitous moment when I was standing near the screens about to introduce Richard Hollingum from Department of Doing and TEDX Auckland

Richard had up a screen saying I’ve been thinking and I was wearing my favourite REMO t-shirt Think

Kristina DC Hoeppner caught that moment.

“@dialogCRM you made it onto my pic of the day: http://bit.ly/dxGh8e – thanx for all your hard work for prep, the event and now follow-up”

The full set of Wordcampnz 2010 photos by Kristina is on Flickr over here
I blogged about it on behalf of #wordcampnz 2010 over here