A big thank you to everyone who made the first Wordcamp Seattle such a success this past Saturday.  The organizers and volunteers made us all feel very welcome and had things nicely set up at the Adobe campus in Fremont – there were so many people involved, but I dealt most directly with Calvin Frietas and Josh Harrison; thanks so much!

ICanHasCheezburger.com was one of the event sponsors and they set up a delicious sponsor/speaker dinner the night before at Pasta Freska (it was an endless parade of a great dishes!).

There were lots of talks going on at once, so I didn’t get to hear that many people live, but I learned so much from the talks I did attend:  Chris Pirillo provided excellent insights into what community is, and why you cannot simply go out and create a community (how many times do we hear that claim in social media business plans?).  Ian Lurie was an excellent makeover artist as he analyzed the pros and cons of three sites submitted by volunteers (and he made SEO concepts clear and sane, which is no mean feat in itself).  Lorelle VanFossen brought her unique brand of WordPress evangelism (I think it’s still a good word to use, Lorelle) to the issue of creating lots of good content quickly (and using bold text judiciously).  Mark Jaquith brought us up to date on the exciting social media plugin suite Buddy Press as well as the notion of canonical plugins for the future (I’ll blog more about this idea of team-developed and supported plugins soon).

There was an Ignite session, which I’d never had a chance to see before.  As someone who’s interested in presentation skills, it’s awesome (in the true sense of the word) to watch people give a five minute presentation with 20 slides that automatically change every 15 seconds…  I was amazed how much they could jam into that time frame, and how well they did keeping their timing with the relentless slide changes.

Liz Strauss made an excellent point in her closing talk that really struck home as I live-blogged and tweeted for my wife and her colleagues (TheBookBroads.com) the next day at a literary festival in Vancouver BC:  we need to stop distinguishing between the online world and the real world when it comes to the concept of community and social interaction – the one is no less real than the other.

And of course the most important aspect of a Wordcamp is meeting all the other people out there who are interested in WordPress.  Speaking of online and offline realities, I’m so used to living in the online WordPress community, that it’s a joy to spend time “in the real world” talking with the members of that community.  A great time was had by all!