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Recap: Speaking at WordCamp Chicago 2009

Truly an outstanding weekend! Thanks again to Brain Gardner and Lisa Sabin-Wilson for organizing an outstanding event event! Other than venue issues with Wifi access, it went as smooth as glass.

It was also nice to meet Matt Mullenweg and Jim Turner in person for the first time.  Having all of my great friend from the Chicago SEO friendly meetup group was awesome as well.

It was fun to be part of a late afternoon speaking trio that put myself in between Kevin Palmer and Micah Baldwin. My talk was about the lessons of social media and search engine marketing measurement and how the driver is truly becoming web analytics management consulting to determine the proper course of action in the content strategy revolution. On your domain and blog you own your terms of service, on a social network you do not – this has major implications that need to be considered deciding what is the right path for your content. The talk got some nice reactions both offline and online…

wordcamp-windycitysocial

All in all, it was an outstanding weekend and I made some great new friends.  I’m looking forward to Wordcamp Chicago 2010!

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So Anil Dash Wants WordPress Users to Change to Moveable Type…

Anil Dash has put up quite an intriguing post arguing the case. Matt Mullenweg are you listening?
I’m gonna add a few more reasons to his list of reasons why it would be wise to do so, but before I do that I thought I’d tell Anil why I’m not doing that…YET

1) I don’t know of any Six Apart family of product users that are overwhelmingly happy with the spam message filters. Akismet is still king of spam deletion. Though lately Akismet is showing cracks of vulnerability.

2) Trackbacks, I have yet to see Six Apart products reliably and consistently accept my trackbacks. This highly unfortunate and unacceptable as trackbacks are a major foundation of the blogoshere. Until you fix this, across both Typepad and Movable type, I will likely continue to be tempted yet decline your offer. UPDATE: I sent a trackback to Anil’s post and it did not immediately post to his blog. 🙁 

3) The duplicate, make that often triplicate, content problems that pollute the blogosphere from Typepad are repulsive and show a complete disrespect to all members of the blogosphere. It makes it hard for me to respect Six Apart as an organization as much as I respect it’s wonderful individuals such as yourself, Andrew Anker, Mena Trott, etc. The situation is simply unacceptable creating inaccurate Technorati link counts, duplicate and even triplicate content and is blogosphere pollution, plain and simple. I met a Typepad representative at last year’s Forrester Consumer Forum and she stated that this area was “not a priority to fix”. I was dumbfounded and confused by this response. Worse, she said Six Apart was working with Technorati to come up with a fix. I’m not exactly the world’s biggest Technorati lover, but why the heck should they write a kluge in their code to fix your massive flaw in your Typepad software? That’s right, they shouldn’t spend a minute on it, they should be fixing the death of blog search. Six Apart should immediately fix this mess and show you respect user’s time by cleaning up this duplicate and triplicate content that inflates Typepad users link counts. I’ve made a note to revisit this issue on May1st, 2008.

4) Your post URL (http://www.movabletype.com/blog/2008/03/a-wordpress-25-upgrade-guide.html) is well, really kinda lame. How about dropping the .html extension on the end? I mean I know of the warm, fuzzy feelings for dot.com 1999 era, but this would be so much cleaner (and better for trackback extension convention standards).

OK, onto WordPress.

1) Anil in my opinion did a fair job in communicating the current state. In fact, many WordPress users will consider this status generous.

2) The plugin problem jumps out at me as the one that is the largest laughing stock, the continual disrespect of the user by not creating a professional backward compatible process in both themes and plugins is NOT sustainable over the long run. Anil should have ranked this issue at the top of his list in my opinion.

3) The widening feature gulf between the WordPress.com and WordPress.org (self-hosted) is becoming absolutely embarrassing and needs to be addressed. It also creates massive potential new blogger confusion as to what is what.

Alright, WordPress I love you, but that love is not blind. Anil is right you need to do much better, in fact Anil didn’t go far enough in where you need to go. My number is on the bio in my blog if Anil or Matt care to reach out about the issues I’ve raised in more detail. I will be watching your progress and wish you both good luck!

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Lee Odden’s Top Ten Online Marketing Tactics for 2008 Survey

Lee Odden has posted the results of his online marketing survey. The blog result is likely directionally correct, but is likely skewed on the high side a bit due to the survey being on a blog. Go figure. 🙂

  • Blogging (25%)
  • Search engine optimization (14%)
  • Email marketing (12%)
  • Pay per click (8%)
  • Blogger relations (6%)
  • Online public relations (5%)
  • Viral marketing (5%)
  • Corporate web site (4%)
  • Social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn) (4%)
  • Webinars/Teleconference (3%)

Continue reading Lee Odden’s Top Ten Online Marketing Tactics for 2008 Survey

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Now Sporting WordPress 2.3.2

Please clear your cache! I’ve installed the latest version of WordPress and made several theme tweaks and additions. I’m pleased to announce that all of the plugins I now have are compliant with WordPress 2.3, I hope this cycle time continues to improve. If you have any problems or have suggestions for improvement, please advise! I welcome your thoughts.

Some WordPress Tips:

– If you have a have inactive plugins you should delete them to make your blog run faster.

My WordPress 2.4 wishlist for Matt Mullenweg and friends (pretty short):

– Post previews that are forwardable to people for feedback in proper link structure with content. 🙂

– Reduction of cycle time of plugin incompatibility. 🙂

– stop emails from being sent from a spam trackback. 🙂

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Snowy Chicago Blogger Brunch

Several Chicago area bloggers, including Joi Podgorny, Liz Strauss and Jean Russell joined out of town visitor Tara Hunt for some breakfast grub at Over Easy where the delightful server Gwen brought us quite tasteful helpings quite flavorful food!

Though I’ve exchanged many emails with Tara before, I had never met her in person. After the meal we chatted and did some shopping. It was really nice talk to Tara as our conversation was focused and introspective – the kind of conversation that makes both people better for it, it was fun. Great fun with everyone chatting about things they are working on and things they want to achieve in 2008 and beyond.

Thanks to everyone who came out on a snowy Chicago morning (and those who didn’t) for some blogger bonding! May many future trackbacks take place…

Tara and Joi are fans of the site Ma.gnolia, is anyone else out there a big fan? I might have to try it out.

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WordPress 2.3 Beta 1

Wow, WordPress 2.3 Beta! Small problem I’ve still not migrated to 2.2 due to plugin incompatibility / instability – especially podpress. As I’ve stated before, I hope that many of these more complex plugins functionality gets integrated into the core of WordPress, reducing this painful upgrading issue.

So my question is this, does WordPress 2.3 work flawlessly with the following plugins? If not, when will if be incorporated into the main code or the plugin made compatible before release of WordPress 2.3?

Add Meta Tags 1.2
Akismet 2.0
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator 3.06
Feedburner Feed Replacement 2.2
Google Sitemaps 2.7.1
podPress 7.9 I’ve never upgraded to Podpress 8.2 or from WordPress 2.1.3 yet due to the problems reported

Recent Comments 2.1.1 beta
Related Posts
ST Add Related Posts to Feed .02
Subscribe To Comments 2.1.1
Trackback Validator 0.7.1
Wordpress PDA 1.0

Thank you for your attention to this important issue, I appreciate it deeply.