WordCamp Birmingham 2009 – Great Times

It is Tuesday, two days after WordCamp Birmingham and I am finally getting back to myself.  Last week was a marathon of hard work, sleep deprivation and good times.  Well the good times were all saved up at the end with WordCamp. 

This was my second year at WordCamp in Bimingham and my good friend Andre Natta did a bang up job putting on a terrific show.  You may recall that Andre and I went to New York City for Affiliate Summit back in August.  This was also my second time presenting.  This year I taught a great little session teaching people how to make their first wordpress theme and I have to thank everyone for the great feedback I received afterwards.  Definitely made my weekend to hear that I had helped a lot of people!

This time, I was the one driving to Birmingham instead of Andre driving to Charlotte.  While I was there I saw a lot of my friends from past southeastern social media events such as BarCamp Chattanooga and WordCamp Birmingham 2008.  The Memphis contingent was present and stronger than ever.

This year in addition to @dougal the Atlanta contingent came out in force as well.  Plus, they had good news to report as they will be putting on a WordCamp in Atlanta this January (I think its slated for January 15 – 16th. That’s right before Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas, so I might really have my hands full if I try to make both shows, which I would like to do.) 

I met a lot of new friends as well and if I get five minutes to breathe as I recover, I’m going to come back to this post and add a long list of names, but I don’t get much of a breather because I’m leaving for IzeaFest tomorrow, packing up the whole family and driving to Orlando for a 4 day show at SeaWorld where I’ll be moderating a panel on What Advertisers Want. 

So as usually, I’m likely to be a little behind on things for a few more days.  But stop back soon, because I have another cool announcement to make about Blogworld.

Here’s some articles from some great people I met this weekend

• WordCamp Birmingham – The First of Several
• Yikes!! Overkill! – WordCamp Birmingham
• WordCamp Birmingham 2009 is a Success
• BuckDaddy who’s running wild through IzeaFest and BlogWorld and even more events than I am this month!
• WordCamp Birmingham Favorite Moment # 5

And then some cool people that I met also (the people with the articles were cool too, just not double listing to avoid redundancy)

• Mike Schinkel
• Kira Fonteneau
• Andrew Jones (I’m not sure if I actually met Andrew, no official introduction, but the second day of WordCamp was at ShiftWorkSpace which I think Andrew runs.
• Todd McCalla who runs Cool Springs, a great site for Cool Springs Tennessee that uses one of my favorite StudioPress themes.
• @The_Jerri_Ann who spoke at wordcamp on migrating a site to WordPress, but I found that she’s also a master at marketing her blog publications to large corporations.  She’s doing some pretty amazing things.  It wouldn’t surprise me a bit to learn that she has become a talent agent or professional publicist promoting bloggers 5 years from now.
• Christopher Spencer
• Emory Rowland