Over the weekend, bloggers, photographers and other online personalities meet up to discuss the latest and greatest from WordPress at the Word Camp Toronto 2009 conference.

Karmacake and I both attended presentations on all three days and as expected, felt great about the knowledge we learned from some presentations while others had us asking, "Why did I pay money for this"?

Some of the presentations that I really got a lot out of included:
David Peralty of www.brandingdavid.com
David did a great presentation about a great website called www.picapp.com that allows bloggers to use high quality stock photography for free instead of having to grab unlicensed images from google images or some other unlicensed site. The fact that PicApp also has a WordPress plugin that will soon include built in lightbox functionality makes this really worth paying attention to. So yeah, free stock photography with a built in WordPress plugin to have it display nicley? Yeah, i'm down with that.


Ilya Grigorick of www.igvita.com
Ilya did a great presentation on leveraging social media to drive users to your site. He did a great break down explaining the differences between the different content sharing sites like digg, stumbleupon, delicious, etc.

Ilya was also showing a great website / WordPress plugin created for keeping track of your social media interactions called www.postrank.com. I really like the look of this plugin and will definitely be installing it.

But like most things in life, the good came with the not-so-good. I'm not really the type of guy to rag on someone who's just trying to do their own hustle but I was a bit annoyed with the presentation of self proclaimed "WordPress and Blog Evangelist" Lorelle Van Fossen about speed blogging and getting the most out of your blog. I have nothing against Lorelle but her presentation was just too "jacked up" for my liking. Just her methods of delivery caused me to focus more on the execution of the message rather then the content itself. She started with a film that was intended to inspire, impress and sell the WordPress platform by showing us users who have embraced WordPress but it ended up making me a bit bored and stir-crazy. I mean, this is a conference with probably 95% of the audience already using and/or developing for WordPress, we're already sold. The remainder of the presentation included watching 6 slides of elk pictures that outline what she gave up to join us to her showcasing a text editor application that while freeware, only the paid version has the features to only make it usable...again, this at an event run by the open source community which has created hundreds of free and powerful text editors.

One of the discussions that killed me was Lorelle's use of ~125 Firefox tabs and how if she opened up Firefox it would kill the conferences bandwidth. Now I understand that everyone is entitled to their own browsing experience but the thought of 125 tabs makes me nauseous =)... But again, that's just my personal opinion, and in my browser I have a max of about 5 tabs before I start feeling crowded.

Overall though, I met a lot of cool people and learned a lot of cool stuff. This was my first real conference regarding web development that I've attended and I think it went pretty well...

Be sure to check out @brandingdavid, @irgrigorik, @picard102, and @photojunkie to get some really cool information on blogging, social media, design and photography.

Good work #WCT09!!!

reado