The first of sevaral? Yeah, I came away with so many topics and things to cover that I just don’t think it would be fair to try to cover them all in a single post… so I’ll do several. Several because I haven’t decided exactly how many yet, I guess we’ll see how that goes together.

Probably the single greatest benefit from WordCamp Birmingham ‘09, or any camp style meeting for that matter, was the opportunity to talk about ideas. The power of the groupthink is undeniable. You can see it in the faces of people as they hear little tidbits that fit perfectly into that missing space in their puzzle. Or even better, opens a door of thought for them they hadn’t even considered before. The cumulative increase in knowledge is just something you’ll never be able to reach by yourself… at least it would be very very hard.

For me, one of the many awesome aspects of attending WordCamp Birmingham was the opportunity to hear, meet, and talk about ideas with Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress. And Matt did a lot more that just come by, speak, and hit the door. He sat in on and participated in several of the sessions… especially on Sunday. Listening to the challenges and solutions the WordPress community is experiencing, suggestion solutions, and taking back ideas to incorporate into the product.

I had the opportunity to talk with Matt one-on-one for a few minutes and wow, was it great. One of the near and (not so) dear topics for me was Akismet, especially my recent success in escaping Akismet hell. As it turns out, the guy who is normally responsible for answering emails about this topic has taken some time off in the past week or two as he and his wife have just had a baby. Matt shared that he had answered many of those emails while the regular guy was out so, as it turns out, it was probably Matt himself that help me with my escape! Cool.

BTW, The whole time I’ve been using it, I’ve pronounced it like ASCII-met. I said it that way talking to Matt and he pointed out the the correct pronunciation should be a-KIZ-met. So I went back and looked at the word… wow, I wasn’t even close.

And there were lots of other great folks I got to meet there. Many I’d “talked” with on-line but never met face-to-face, many I was meeting for the first time. Thanks to all of you for your input and contribution to my present and future success! Please, let me know if I can ever help you in any way!

@jtrigsby

For some people, time marches on. For me, if feels like I’m being run over by it! September has proven to be an extremely busy month and October does appear to offer any reprieve. But such is my life… I’m not complaining mind you, I get to do some awesomely cool stuff and meet even more awesomely awesome people! (BTW, you can thank @RodKirby for all the awesomes! I know I do!)

One of the really cool things on my calendar recently was SocialCamp Memphis, a decidedly un-conference in the BarCamp tradition. Now, if you’ve been reading Life in the Internet even a short time, you’re gonna recognize that term from my ramblings about BarCamp Chattanooga. Well lets suffice it to say… I’m a big fan of the format!

In fact, it was BarCampChatt where I met Dave Barger (@lalunablanca), the driving force behind SocialCamp Memphis. (Thanks Dave, it was awesome!) But I can hear you out there asking now, “What is a social camp anyway?” Well, I’m glad you asked!
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Wow! Back and forth…forth and back. Let’s put this debate to bed right now!

Last week, they made it official. We’ve suspected it for a long time but now, all doubt has been removed. According to the Google Webmaster Central Blog, Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking. Matt Cutts, head of the web spam team at Google even confirmed on his personal blog that Google doesn’t use the keywords meta tag in web search (he’s also dropped a short video here also).

And yet the argument continues. Other search engines disagree, for instance Bing disputes what Google says. Well, this is a pretty simple argument to end, but a very important one! If you are even remotely concerned about traffic to your site… LISTEN UP!

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