Mactoberfest in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Saturday, October 18, 2008, started the first of a week long celebration called Hawaii Geek Week.

Designated by the governor of Hawaii, there is a week of tech events all over Honolulu, ending with PodCamp/WordCamp Hawaii.

The first event, Mactoberfest, was a great success with a photography and computer tech swap meet and a day of speakers covering web technologies and applications. It began with myself, Lorelle VanFossen, speaking about how WordPress changes lives, followed by Lorenz Sell of iLovePhotos, John Dalton of Studio Artist, and a great panel discussing the past and the future of web technology, blogging, and journalism. OhScrap has some pictures of Mactoberfest. read more

WordPress 2.7 feature freeze announced. Parent/child WordPress Themes change how Themes will work in WordPress 2.7 - are you ready? WordCamp Bangkok this weekend, Hawaii next weekend. WordPress Weekly Podcast talks SEO. WordCast Podcast talks about influential bloggers and WordPress folks. And more WordPress and WordCamp news.

WordPress News

WordPress 2.7 Development: As of October 14, 2008, WordPress 2.7 has frozen all features to prepare for the first round of release candidate testing. The announcement of the first release candidate should be out any time for those willing to risk their blogs and their lives to test this new version. read more

More WordCamp announcements and news. WordPress 2.7 information such as impact on Theme developers with comments and parent/child Themes. Lester Chan’s WordPress Plugins can be found on famous blogs. WP Super Cache updated and faster than ever. And more WordPress news.

WordPress News

Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.7: The following are articles and posts with information you need to know for WordPress 2.7 if you are a developer, WordPress Theme or Plugin author.

• Sivel - Separating Pings from Comments in WordPress 2.7
• Ottodestruct - WordPress 2.7 Comments Enhancements for Themes
• WordCamp NYC: Matt Mullenweg on the State of Wordpress also gives a walk through of WordPress 2.7 (video)
• Look under WordPress Themes and Plugins news for information on the new Parent/Child Theme structure in WordPress 2.7.

WordPress 2.7 Development: As development of WordPress 2.7 nears the freeze date, the WordPress Development Updates is firing up with a lot of action. Some development news includes threaded comments and the new Comments API, Quick Edit for Tags, Categories, and Link Categories, TinyMCE updated and improved for caching in Google Gears and browsers resulting in speeding up Write and Edit page by 40%, increasing content area for writing blog posts, implementation of some WordPress 2.7 Wireframe features, a comment type filter for the edit-comments.php Comments Panel to view all types of comments including trackbacks and pingbacks, batch editing for posts and Pages, comment paging, drafts now have real timestamp, drafts now ordered properly in the All Posts timeline, improvements in custom fields, the addition of “Close comments for old posts” to the Settings > Discussion, a Themes update API, and improvements to the Administration Panels and styles.

Portland, Oregon, Having a WordPress Upgrade Party: After the very successful WordCamp Portland, Portland WordPress fans are having a semi-un-not-so-official Wordpress Upgrade Party at CubeSpace on Nov 10, 2008. Are you having a WordPress Upgrade Party with your community’s WordPress fans? read more

Blog World Expo is in Las Vegas this weekend, September 20-21, 2008. I’m going to be there with Woopra, Layered Tech, and WordPress, and from the look of the Conference Schedule, so is everyone else.

The list of Exhibitors in the Exhibition Hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center this year is incredibly diverse. So many companies want to reach out to bloggers, and so many blog, social media, and web technologies are popping up everywhere - it’s going to be interesting to learn what’s hot, what’s not, and what will be the future of the web.

Some of the exhibitors I hope to meet up with include: read more

I’m going to be at Blog World Expo in Las Vegas on September 20-21, 2008, and so is David Peralty, who listed “Some People I Hope to Meet at Blog World Expo.”

The list of Exhibitors and Speakers at Blog World Expo this year is incredible. A veritable list of whose who.

His list of people he’d like to meet got me thinking about my list. And then I started thinking about all the conferences I attend and speak at every year and all the fantastic people I meet, some famous and some not, who change my life in those few minutes of meet and greet.

I love blog and web conferences. I learn so much. While many think that I am there to be the educator, I enjoy them because of the lessons I learn from fellow speakers, but most of all from fellow attendees. Those quickly caught moments in corridors, exhibition halls, at my book table, or even in the restroom. Those are where the real business of a conference really happens. Those quick moments of connections made that last long after the conference. read more

I’m still reeling and processing all the exciting events associated with WordCamp 2008 in San Francisco. Saturday was packed with so many of the best speakers - the best of the best in blogging, SEO, WordPress, PHP, Theme and Plugin development - it was blogging and WordPress overload.

Today’s conferences and events are true definitions of information overload and blogs and social media play important roles in the over-abundance of input. They are also part of the new online social networking surge, allowing attendees to share their experience of the event with the world through various media and social networks.

While attending the conference and afterward, there was so much information being shared on different services - it was difficult to keep up. Many were live blogging the WordCamp event on their blogs while others were using Twitter, Tumblr, and other microblog services to share the event. Many were also discussing the event on Twitter, Pounce, Plurk, and other social services.

It used to be that event coordinators would put most of their energies into the event specifics, corrdinating speakers, attendees, social functions, and logistics. Today’s events must also prepare and monitor the online world to help coordinate and track discussions, news, and feedback before, during, and after the event.

Here are some of the coverage from different services about WordCamp 2008 in San Francisco, a mere sampling of all the coverage.
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Layered Technologies, one of the world’s leaders in web hosting and server technology, is hosting a two day conference in Las Vegas, June 26-27, 2008, called the LT PACT Conference 2008. The two-day event is free, but registration is recommended.

As bloggers become more server savvy, challenging web hosts to keep up with their growing demands, this is a great opportunity to meet and learn from the industries’ leading experts on SEO, industry trends, virtualization trends and technology, site optimization, web hosting, cloud/grid hosting technology, online storage technology, intellectual property, email and mailing list management and business practices, site automation, business of blogging, security vulnerabilities and threats, backups, and more.

The list of whose who among the list of speakers and the event activities and seminars includes:

• Matt Mullenweg of Automattic and WordPress
• Barry Abrahamson, the server guru of Automattic and WordPress.com
• Andrew Skale, Attorney, Mintz-Levin and expert in patent, trademark, copyright litigation, and entertainment law
• James Staten, Principal Analyst of IT Infrastructure and Operations at Forrester Research, a leading expert on x86 servers and infrastructure and trends
• John Pozadzides of One Man’s Blog, Layered Technologies, and Woopra
• Chris Samson, the Senior Hosting Technology Specialist from CSNA and Microsoft
• Deven Kampenhout, Web Platform Architect Evangelist at Microsoft, Tim Johnson, Senior Manager of Channel Market Development, Global Marketing, at Seagate
• Jonah Stein, blogger of It’s The ROI
• Jimmy Guerrero, the Senior Product Marketing Manager in the Database Group of Sun Microsystems coordinating MySQL’s Web 2.0 and SaaS marketing programs, Dennis Dayman, Chief Privacy Officer of Eloqua, an expert in security, legal, privacy, and public relations issues
• Barry Lynn, the Chairman and CEO of 3Tera, expert on data center innovations
• Andy Schroepfer, the Founder and Hosting Visionary of Tier 1 Research, an expert in the hosting industry

And me, Lorelle VanFossen. I’ll be joining a panel discussion on the Business of Blogging with Matt Mullenweg and John Pozadzides on Thursday.

Jad Younan and Elie Khoury, the co-founders and lead developers of Woopra, a new and popular web analytics program currently in beta, will be flying in from Lebanon for the event, giving everyone a chance to meet these innovators.

There will also be a lot of fun and social interaction, and a lot of food. Among the fun is the LT PACT Poker Tournament hosted by Master of Ceremonies Robert W. Thompson II of NBC’s BravoTV Celebrity Poker Showdown with a total purse of USD $5,000.

Hope to see you there!

We do not remember days; we remember moments.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Successful and Outstanding Bloggers Conference (SOBCon) in Chicago last weekend was a collection of moments I will remember for a long time.

Throughout the weekend, people kept asking what was different about this conference from all the other conferences they go to. It was clear it was different, and different from the first moment. Why?

Was it because it was a group of bloggers? I’ve been to blog events and while that was part of the reason, it wasn’t the whole reason.
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The worst part of the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers Conference (SOBCon) is that I now have to add over a hundred feeds to my feed reader.

When you are in a room with over a hundred of the most powerful, exiting, socially aware and responsible, and enthusiastic bloggers, your feed reader count is going to grow. Not to mention your Twitter list. And Skype. And GTalk. And email list and all the other ways we stay in touch.

The most amazing part of SOBCon this year is the proof that lightening does strike twice. It struck twice in Chicago as Liz Strauss and Terry Starbucker hosted the second annual SOBCon event, bringing together top notch bloggers for The Biz School for Bloggers, helping bloggers learn how the blog marketplace works and how to turn those blogging connections and decisions into money.

As both speaker and attendee, Anita Bruzzese wowed the audience on tips for being a blogging journalist and social responsibility for what you publish. She also admitted that she had no idea what people were talking about throughout the weekend (describing it as Klingon) and that she has a lot to learn about blogging.

Many were impressed with the presentation by David Bullock, especially when he blew the crowd away with:
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One of the loudest messages shouted from the rooftops in Chicago at Successful and Outstanding Bloggers Conference (SOBCon) was: It’s not about you.

This came through on many levels. Let’s examine a few.

Your blog is not about you.

Your blog is not about you. Sure, it starts out about being about what you want. About what messages you want to send. About how you want to frame and publish content. About who you want to reach and what you want to get out of your blog.

But once you hit the publish button, it no longer is about you and what you want. It’s about the readers. It’s about what they want. It’s about what they need. It’s about giving them what they want and need in order to keep them, and attract new readers.
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