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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.