EightBlack.

For those who are interested, today is the last day of trading for Eight Black. Tomorrow we begin a new chapter as a part of a bigger, stronger entity.

Embarrassingly, the new websites are still being glued together - but we will get there.

The blog will be still be around for a little while - mainly because I have some commitments to the Web 2.0 folks in the US this April and then later in the year for the Web 2.0 Summit.

And besides, what other avenue lets me vent, swear and complain as much as I like.

This year, we’ve got a lot lined up for our video series. Plenty of guest speakers, plenty to cover. Here’s an up to date chat with Australia’s leading Wordpress authority, James Farmer.

We talk about the latest investment into Automattic, the company founded by Matt Mullenweg and the entity behind Wordpress. He’s now a little better off, thanks to a cash injection of some US$29.5 million.

Stay tuned for more video content. And if there’s someone or something you’d like covered, drop me a line.

I actually can’t do Alister Cameron any sort of justice with this post summary because I’m not a technical junkie. I managed to watch the entire video, but as soon as Alister started talking about tagging, semantic query, CSS, Sandbox etc, I drifted off to somewhere calmer in my own mind and found myself thinking about Jessica Alba, coconut oil and a secluded beach in Tahiti.

Or something like that.

I’m actually going to ask Ben, our resident geek to comment on Alister’s session later today. Ben was the one behind the camera.

So, while I’m not technically inclined and not a credible witness, one thing I am confident of is my ability to pick passionate, smart people. This is Alister. He was in his element. And you can easily tell that he’s passionate about design, passionate about finding a better way of doing things on the web (from a technical perspective) and smart enough to build his own plugin for Wordpress - called “Classy Body”.

He’s a self confessed “code-junkie”, a “best practices junkie” and to him, “coding matters”.

He knows his stuff. If you were a corporate person watching this video or meeting Alister, you could be confident that you’ve found your man, in terms of 100% technical competence. And I’m sure if Alister was presenting to a non-technical audience, he would be easily able to explain things in simple english.

As I said, I’ll ask Ben to weigh in below in the first comment section with his thoughts. You can find out more about Alister at his site here and the Classy body plugin Alister refers to in the clip is here.

And keywords that are important to this discussion and post are (Tagging, Semantic Query, Classy Body, Yahoo User Interface Library, Grid/Font/Reset, Wordpress Themes, Sandpress).

Bottom line is this - Alister is a hard core blogger. His own blog is living proof. The thing is packed to the roof with content about the niches he plays in. He has focus and is a smart marketer. If you’re a techie, watch the entire clip. If you’re not, make your techie watch the clip and take notes.

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I actually missed this session, so I only have the video footage to rely on (like many of you). A 7 year old was waiting for me at home to make sure all the Dads at our place had enough beer to drink while 30 kids wrecked our back yard celebrating his birthday.

I’ve been wanting to meet Darren for a while now and we quickly bumped into each other outside the Wordcamp Melbourne venue (as I was leaving and he was arriving).

Darren’s main site - ProBlogger is considered the number 1 blog in Australia, according to Blogpond - the “semi-official” monitor of blog rankings on our shores. Actually, Meg has done a terrific job with this - and will admit the pitfalls of the way Blogpond ranks who makes the Top 100 and who doesn’t. No system is perfect, and until a better way of blog measurement is found (and agreed on), then most people are simply happy to see their blog make the list.

I don’t think Darren cares where he sits on the list. Well, that maybe not quite true. But, once you visit ProBlogger and his Digital Photography School blog, you’ll quickly realise that he’s a hard core publisher. Content is first rate, the monetisation efforts are optimised without being intrusive and he generates a lot of “interraction” within his community - sometimes generating comments in the 300-400 range. This is normally left to the likes of Mark Cuban et al.

Darren is a pro. He’s a part of the B5 Media group, a publisher of many blogs, a well respected and well liked entity within the blogging community and a good example of how, if you really want to make a full time living from blogging, you should go about it.

I know James Farmer was grateful for Darren’s appearance at Wordcamp. As was I. And it’s good to see that in Melbourne, we have 2 of the blog community’s leading blog authorities in Darren Rowse and Alex Shiels.

More on Darren here and here.

And Aviansh points us to a in depth approach about how to measure the success of your blog here. You can see the entire video of Avinash’s presentation from Blogworld by following this link.

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We were pleased to be a part of the first “official” Wordpress gig in Melbourne. Organised by a self confessed Wordcamp uber geek, James Farmer from Edublogs and Incsub fame.

Actually, we had the easy part.All we had to do was pay for the drinks, contribute towards the venue and throw in a couple of iPod Nano’s (congratulations to the 2 winners by the way).

Ok, I’ll admit the filming wasn’t up to standard - but hey, what do you expect on a warm Saturday afternoon down by the water at Victoria Dock.

This session featured Alex Shiels from Automattic. I’ll load up the slides as soon as I receive them, so check back soon. Alex is one serious code head, respected globally by the Automattic folks and the larger Wordpress community. It’s worth 30 odd minutes of your time to watch Alex’s presentation.

Let me know what you think.

Up next is the session from Darren Rowse, Australia’s number one blogger.

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Ok, this is the last of the video series from Blogworld Expo. The hard disk space on my Mac is about to run out! And my digital camera is exhausted. The session, titled “Going Global With New Media” was presented by Des Walsh (an Aussie) and Rich Brooks (A US based internet marketing consultant).

For those of you who were there, I edited out the start - where Des and Rich were mucking around with Second Life and they couldn’t quite get the demo to work. Frankly, I can’t get my head around Second Life. To be honest, I have enough trouble with my first life to worry about another one.

There were some interesting questions from the audience, and the whole one hour 20 minute presentation was more like a group of friends sitting around having a dinner party conversation. Which was a whole lot better. Except for the fact that we weren’t drunk.

I was intrigued by a question from the enigmatic Scott Allen. He asked “Since we’re talking about global, what do the non Americans in the room think of they way Americans do business”. Or something close to that.

I pulled out the question in a separate clip.

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I bit my lip. You have to remember that I’m married to an American and I learned long ago that if I wanted to have any sort of sex life at all, I had better be careful of what I say about the “mother land” and the gun slinging Texan of a President. Actually, my wife thinks he’s a buffoon, but let’s not go there.

(Now look what’s happened, I’ve just committed the cardinal sin. Blog etiquette says that you’re not supposed to talk about sex or politics and I’ve just mentioned both in the same paragraph).

Anyway.

Des Walsh is a fountain of knowledge and Rich clearly knows his stuff. It was interesting to note that before their presentation in Vegas, neither Rich nor Des had actually met, forcing them to depend on the technologies that were at the very centre of their presentation to this audience.

Des had also just presented at AdTech China, along with Corporate Blogging Guru, Debbie Weil.

This was a good session to immerse yourself in. It’s worth watching the video in its entirety. It’s solid in content and Des and Rich presented well together.

Let me know what you think. And more on Des Walsh here and Rich Brooks here and here.

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This was session one from Blogworld Expo and a good place to start for those “new” to blogging. Led by Andy Wibbels and Jen McClure, the pair gave a very solid overview into blogging, with the Q&A session probably the most helpful. For those used to the new medium, the concepts covered may have been “basic”, but by the end of hour plus discussion, no one walked away empty handed.

Wibbels has authored many books on blogging, most notably “Blog Wild, A Guide For Small Business Blogging” and consults to a wide range of corporate clients.

McClure works for a non profit and it’s interesting to see just how many in the non profit sector have jumped aboard the blog train. Her bio states,

Jennifer McClure is the executive director of the Society for New Communications Research, a global, nonprofit 501(c)(3) think tank dedicated to the advanced study of new communications tools, technologies and emerging modes of communication, and their effect on traditional media, professional communications, business and society. Her 20-year career includes work in all facets of professional communications, including market and media research, journalism and publishing, PR and marketing consultation. She is also the co-founder and producer of New Communications Forum.

I always find it interesting to see what platform the experts use. In this case, Wibbels uses Wordpress and McClure is a Typepad fan. One thing is for sure, and validated by the people I spoke to at Blogworld is that once you’ve started using a certain platform, it is very hard to change.

A lot of people probably thought Blogworld was about a whole heap of super geeks hanging out, talking one’s and zero’s. The refreshing part of it was that while true, you could talk to people who quickly made you lose the will to live, there were folks like Wibbels and McClure who gave a down to earth, in plain english overview of the whole blogging scene, the pitfalls, the benefits, how to get started and how to keep going.

If you attended Business Blogging 101 and then Debbie Weil’s session with a very strong panel from “corporate”, you will have learned what you needed to in order to get started, and more importantly, how to sell the whole concept of blogging internally.

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Here’s Avinash’s presentation at Blogworld Expo - with the the PDF of the presentation here as well. Anybody who has anything to do with a blog, or even a static website should watch this entire session.I regard Avinash as the world’s leading authority on web analytics. So does Google - hence the role he has there as “Analytics Evangelist”.Avinash is a pleasure to work with, a pleasure to watch and 110% pure energy, enthusiasm and content.

(For those of you who have noticed, I’ve moved all our feature length videos to Blip.tv). It seems to be working fine. I’d be keen to see how you rate the picture and audio quality.

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I don’t think people should under-estimate what Matt has achieved. And at the ripe old age of 23, it makes you wonder what else he’s got left up his sleeve.Wordpress is a remarkable, open source platform that is as easy to use as sending an email. In many ways, it has revolutionised the push button publishing industry. This is the entire video from Blogworld Expo last week in Las Vegas.

Ed Sussman from Fast Company did the interviewing. It was a good session, with Ed providing the right tempo for the hour long chat. This interview is one of three that will be transcribed. Let me know what you think.

1. Track ALL your RSS feeds. Use Feedburner.

2. One of the most useful web analytics resources (and it’s free) is Website Grader. Avinash spoke of it during his presentation. Everyone should use this.

3. Alexa rankings are considered by most of the web savvy folks as useless. I agree. Compete is much better due to the fact that they pull data from ISP’s, their toolbar and various opt-in panels (as opposed to Alexa, who depend only people installing the Alexa toolbar).

4. If you run a Wordpress blog, an important plug in is the General Stats plugin, which can be found here.

5. Download and install The Buzz Monitor, “a very useful tool for communities and organizations interested in tracking blogs, podcasts, videos, photos that talk about a specific issue”. Developed would you believe by The World Bank. Amazing.

6. Google Webmaster Tools - provide a list of keywords that Google thinks describe you. Plus a host of other things. Critical and very useful tool. More here.

7.  If you use iGoogle, there is a plugin which allows you to see all you Google Analytics Key data in one place, without having to log into the GA interface. Very cool. And a clever way for Google to promote the use of iGoogle.

Let me know if you found some or all of these tips helpful. They certainly were to me.

Follow Up - I should point out by the way, that these 7 tips I picked up just from Avinash Kaushik’s session alone. I’ll be posting the full video clips of 3-4 more sessions as soon as I kick Google Video into gear. The last 3 uploads had a heart attack and didn’t take. Standby…