Friday was Phoenix WordCamp. It’s where everybody roasts Blogger buttons around a campfire and chants WordPress, WordPress, WordPress. Nah, not really. I don’t even know why these things are called camps!  There are no tents, fires, or s’mores. Wait, WordCamp was held in a tent! One of those humongous commercial semi-permanent tents with A/C. And we had sack (picnic?) lunches.

Anyway, it was a day filled with WordPress information. It started off with some woman I’ve never heard of calling her self the Diva of WordPress and yet preaching “we don’t care if you have bad spelling or grammar, we just want to hear what you have to say!” Cue immediate disrespectful twittering from many people. Then another all-about-me presenter and more cranky twittering. Then some kid who looked 12 but seemed to know a lot. The morning was filled with more motivational type speakers – all about content. The afternoon leaned more to the technical side, the guy who created WordPress in the first place, and local WordPress magicians Chuck Reynolds and Josh Strebel had a Q&A panel. Another guy got all geeky with step-by-step widget coding that was way over my head. Merlin Mann was highly entertaining, and Brent Spore was great. All-in-all a nice motivational day, but not what I expected.  Props to my friend Chuck for organizing the 500 seat sold-out WordCamp.

DebbiePodcamp

Saturday and Sunday were this year’s PodCampAZ, the one I’m involved in planning. I spent most of Saturday working registration with Rachel so I got to meet lots of new people. I helped Evo with his panel (I clicked the slide advance button) and helped set-up and take down. Yesterday I set up registration, but spent more time in actual panels. Brent’s panel on social media almost immediately got intense when the packed room divided between the let’s-keep-it-to-ourselves side and the we-need-to-bring-in-new-people-side.  He wanted to get people talking and it certainly did. Another friend Katie had a panel on social media but it was more what you should and should not put out there. The best panel I went to was a WordPress panel, where Josh skimmed over the best settings and must-have widgets and plugins – which was the information I’d been looking for from WordCamp.

So expect some changes to this site as soon as I’m rested up. I’m still tired as hell and I have a lot of notes to expand on while the information is fresh. We all learned that GeekWeek is toooooo much at one time. Information overload + planning anxiety + RL stress = exhaustion. There were other conferences earlier in the week that some people attended too. Thursday was the Entrepreneurship Conference, there was a design camp somewhere and I think one other thing and some people hit them all. Each event was successful but running them all within a week is too much which is likely why the PodCampAZ ending wasn’t attended by as many people as we expected. Our numbers were much lower than registered though there were a lot of walk-ins.

I was surprised at how many of our speakers failed to show up! When I checked with our speaker coordinator Lawrence, only about half of the n0-shows bothered to contact him with an explanation beforehand. It’s fucking rude as HELL to have a roomful of people waiting for you and not show up.