WordPress Convention 2007

This was my first convention about blogging and such. Better to sit in a lecture hall, eat fun food, drink and hear lectures than WORK.
(Fellow bloggers, Please read all the way through before you lynch me.)
Coming in was a bit of a shock. I felt like I landed in a National Geographic TV Special. “The mating rituals of the common Geek.” people were definitely talking another language. Names were almost irrelevant, people introducing themselves by their blogs.
While waiting for the 1st lecture to start, people were already debating on what forum to open so they can chat online while the conference is still running. In other words: “Let’s all come together to a place and chat online with people that are in the same room as we are.” Perhaps they feel better talking online than face to face?
God knows.
I definitely enjoyed being a nobody for a day, watching this close circle of friends, speaking a language that I sometimes understood. And in many ways that is what it was. It seemed like these 200 people or so all know each other intimately, all read each other, comment on each other, and I felt that I would not be surprised if most of their traffic is the same 200 people.
One interesting example is this 1st speaker, an interesting lady called Lorelle that little me never heard of before. She was obviously a guru of sorts, and I knew that before the weekend would be over, tons of posts would be talking about her, referencing to her, hoping to be referenced back. Everyone wants a link from one of the top blogs around, right? Indeed, as I saw online, many posts of people that were there talked about the event, specifically about her, and surprise – got mentioned in her blog. See here. (go to the news section). I think my favorite, that really gives a good example of the point I want to make is this one. People, be careful with this recursion!

However, as time passed, and I pondered if I would ever post this piece, for which I will surely earn many haters (“Not only is he a snob, but he doesn’t even dare identify himself! didn’t he listen to Lorelle that said you must identify yourself to earn responsibility??”) I grew to appreciate them. A small but dedicated community, that really puts a lot of time and effort into this thing, that for me is just a small time hobby. They boldly face the world of “doing anything in computers in Hebrew” and have translated whole parts of the platform to fit them. They support each other, and help the ones in need. These are the people that in general, simply produce stuff that lots of us read and enjoy. So what is the harm if some of them are a bit geeky? They are the ones that made WordPress the interesting place that I enjoy blogging in, and made WordPress in Hebrew a 5 minute installation. Give or take an hour.

(BTW – Sadly, I have my reasons for which I cannot tell you who I am, but I do appear shortly in the video you can see here, at Niv Calderon’s blog post.) 🙂

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