thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

Earlier this morning I was privileged to be on Radio Wammo live talking about this years #wordcampnz in Auckland next Saturday 21st of April. We talked about who should come along, why and what it is all about.

The format is q & a with no real script. Glenn Williams does this every day and once the talk is over the video goes up on the Radio Wammo site within minutes.

RadioWammo runs on WordPress (as do many media sites now.)  It is radio with the added zest of being able to watch it either live on ustream or later off the site. Below is my post on the wordcampnz site

“Glenn Williams is a tech media whiz. His @radiowammo show is a treasure trove of radio shows with great people such as Vaughn Davis, Jayson Bryant, Ben Young, Russell Brown and even a very long running series with Sam Hunt.

What is different about Radio Wammo is that Glenn live mixes the video on air. The various shows are on each weekday between 7am & 10am (UTC 1900-2200) and on demand 24/7 at other times.

The show is mostly completely unscripted and completely live with no edits – enjoy. Questions and comments as always are very welcome.”

“P.S – For wordcampers – Glenn will be doing a lightning talk on Saturday afternoon about Radio Wammo see our latest speaker announcement.

I forgot to mention we will filming all speakers on Saturday and making a mixtape DVD of the results for #wordcampnz attendees. BTW – we won’t be live streaming since there are some bandwidth challenges with our particular location although we may try to do some of that if we can.

Sites mentioned in the show:

• TangataWhenua.com    speakers Nik & Potaua see speakers
• Paleo Zone Nutrition speaker Julianne Taylor
• Crown Fibre Holdings speaker (the writer – Jason Kemp)
• NZ Womans Weekly“

Special feature (WordPress example in the show) have a look at the Crown Fibre site. CFH is all about the Ultra Fast Broadband rollout in NZand is a project that I have been working on for quite some time. It has been completely rebuilt in WordPress and I’m delighted to have been the developer on the project.

Will do a separate post about that – please let me know what you think about the video and do come along to #wordcampnz next weekend.

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.

Planning for the next WordCampNZ event in Wellington is in full swing. As a trustee and one of the key organisers we are busy confirming speakers, sponsors and selling tickets.

If you are in Wellington or visiting that way plan to come along. It all happens on Sat 19th of Feb at Te Papa and for a half day on the Sunday.

We have 6 speakers confirmed with more to come and a super panel with some big names on the Saturday afternoon. Here is my list of 7 reasons to be at WordcampNZ this year. Not really in order

1. Michael Brandon is NZ’s top SEO guru and he knows WordPress inside out.
2. Paul Gibbs is a BuddyPress world expert from UK. BuddyPress is like facebook where you set your own terms of service.
3. David Farrar runs NZ’s busiest blog with 500-700 comments a day.
4. Julie Starr rocks on media and blogging at Evolving Newsroom.
5. John Ford is an expert on WordPress Security
6. Justin Sainton is talking coupons – a whitehot space now – NZ’s Groupy has just been sold to yellow
7. Super panel with Lance Wiggs and Richard McManus (RWW)

Wellington that week is going to be a blast with the well respected webstock conference on just before WordcampNZ.

I got to represent WordCampNZ on Radio Wammo Live today giving a quick run through of what the event is about. This is radio which is video streamed live. Video link is below.