Attending WordCamp Denver this last weekend was a real eye-opener, but not in the way I expected.

What amazed me most was the young age of some of the presenters. OK, I’ll admit it. One presenter in particular had me wanting to desperately raise my hand and ask him how old he was. Fortunately, one of the people I was sitting next to did that first. He is a local 16 years old and his name is Dave Moyer, of the WordCast podcast. What a strong stage presence for such an early age! I kept wondering if he had been doing this for years, or if he was one of those lucky people that is born with (or developed early on) a no-fear attitude toward speaking in public. I truly envied him as I watched him present his information and engaged the audience with ease. His topic? Podcasting and Wordpress…of course.

He spoke of the podcasting environment he works in, showing a pretty darn impressive picture of the cool gadgets sitting at his desk. Me? I have a USB headset. That’s about it.

Some of the various podcasting tools he mentioned were:

1) Podpress plugin – a Wordpress plugin that seems to have been abandoned by its creator. Personally speaking, I have been using Podpress for about 2.5 years and was truly bummed when I found that it didn’t work with my theme and Wordpress 2.7.

2) Powerpress plugin (by Blubrry) – this is what I replaced Podpress with on my Outlook, SharePoint, and Business Technology podcast site. It works great for my needs, which include mostly video podcasts.

3) MTR Podcast Recorder plugin – this is something new I hadn’t heard of before and couldn’t wait to get home to find out more about it. Said to be the easiest way for people to record directly via Wordpress and saves to the proper location. It comes with a player widget to add to your sidebars, posts, or pages. Looks very interesting and just as soon as I have some play-time I’ll be fiddling around with it on my test site.

4) Audio Player plugin (by 1 Pixel Out) – This player is a familiar sight to me because Podpress uses it. I did notice on their website that they include a link to instructions on how to use this player on a non-Wordress site. Cool. I know people that could use such a player.

5) FreePlayMusic.com – free music for your podcast. I already knew about music.podshow.com. Personally, I’ve purchased some great music from StudioCutz. I really prefer the high quality of music they offer.

6) Feedburner – glad he mentioned the need for everyone to move their existing Feedburner accounts to Google NOW. Read more about the need to do this and what just happened to your Feedburner feeds if you haven’t moved them yet.

OK, moving on…

Matt Mullenweg (creator of Wordpress – or co-creator…not sure which) – I really enjoyed his keynote presentation. You could see his genuine love for the product he created. He was another one of those overachiever younguns’ I mentioned earlier. In my mind I kept thinking “Hey Matt, I sure hope you’re making some really good money from this free product you’ve created”. How does that work? It’s a free product. Everyone loves using it. Many companies are using it to replace their static HTML sites (me included). Yet…how does he make the money he deserves? I’m curious.

I loved it when he put the question out to the audience, “What would you like to see in the next version?” responding to many of the ideas being tossed about in the audience with “Yeah, that would be cool, wouldn’t it”. Made me feel as if I was witnessing the birth of a few new features that might show up in upcoming Wordpress versions. That whole blogging by mobile thing is very interesting. It was fun and exciting.

He reminded me that I should go back and take a new look at Wordpress.tv. I guess I didn’t really think about the new videos showing up on a regular basis. And you KNOW how much I love training videos! Note to self: visit wordpress.tv today.

Some of the other interesting tidbits he mentioned:

1) Themes – cool themes I want to take a closer look at are: Monotone – a photo blogging theme where the page colors change automatically to match the photo. How on earth do people think of this stuff? Another theme is Prologue – a Twitter-style theme for your group blog. Brilliant!

2) Then there’s BuddyPress for Wordpress MU – turns your multi-user Wordpress app into a social networking site. There’s a test site for you to check it out at http://testbp.org. I’ve already been hearing a lot about this in Twitterville.

3) He talked about the acquisition of IntenseDebate…more on that next…

InsenseDebate, a local company, focuses on enhancing the lonely comments feature we all take for granted in our blogs. It’s so nice when people think out of the norm and come up with awesome ideas to grow a feature that we don’t think much about and have accepted it just as it is. “IntenseDebate comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website”. With features such as Comment Threading, Reply-by-Email, and Importing/Exporting…keep an eye out for this one, folks. I think this will take the user community by storm.

The last speaker of the day was Micah Baldwin, another local cool dude. I have seen his name around and can now say that I’ve experienced him in person. Listening to him IS an experience. His presentation about Trust was genuine, authentic, transparent, enjoyable, and very interesting…with just the right amount of light expletives to let us know that we’re watching him be his true self, nothing less, nothing more. And I loved it! So did my husband.

Speaking of my husband, Darryl, I’d like to thank him for being such a good sport about me dragging him to an all-day event on a topic he knows nothing about (he’s a network admin). He showed interest in what what being discussed and even took notes for me…just in case I missed something in my own note-taking. What a guy! How does a girl get so lucky?

Also, unexpectedly, I met Teri Dempski. A virtual assistant I’ve virtually connected with on more than just a few occasions. It was great to finally meet her in person!

In addition to Teri, we unexpectedly hooked up with my friend Chris Morin. Our party of two turned into a party of four, all enjoying a nice lunch at Dozens.

I was fully prepared to be one of those cool people who Twitter at events, but alas…it was not meant to be. I never could get a signal in the auditorium on my cell phone, even trying their wireless they had available for us to use. Bummer. I had Twitter envy as I saw people around me twittering away and posting on their blogs in real-time.  Kind of felt a little left out of the party going on around me. I just turned the darn thing off so as not to drain my suck-y T-Mobile Dash battery.

All in all, it was a fun and enjoyable day – and I was happy to be a part of it all.  A special thanks to everyone who hosted it. These types of events are very time-consuming. I appreciate you putting it all together for us.

Looking forward to the next one!

Andrea

Andrea Kalli
Certified Internet and Social Marketing VA

WishList – Wordpress Membership Sites and Retention Strategies

MATERIAL CONNECTION DISCLOSURE: You should assume that I, Andrea Kalli, have an affiliate relationship and/or another material connection to the providers of goods and services mentioned in this page and may be compensated when you purchase from a provider. You should always perform due diligence before buying goods or services from anyone via the Internet or offline.

Tags and Categories: blogging, business productivity, dave moyer, Denver, intensedebate, matt mullenweg, micah baldwin, podcasting, wordcamp, wordpress, wordpress

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