EightBlack.

I’m constantly amazed at how many digital agencies here in Australia and abroad all push the virtues of their own, proprietary Content Management Systems.

I can’t see the point.

From a client retention perspective - I can. That makes sense. Sort of.

But for the client, buying into a stand alone CMS is just not logical.

I’m a big believer in “open-source”. I just don’t think you should be hog tied to the one supplier for the rest of your life. We’ve got a client who has spent a kings ransom on the development of their website and are lumbered with a CMS that’s clunky to use, is terrible as far as SEO is concerned and has them tied to this CMS to 2036. Or something like that.

I think the web has to get easier to use from a publishing perspective. We’re a long way from it yet, but more and more people have discovered that blogging environments such as Moveable Type and WordPress are far more than simple website platforms.

WordPess is capable of matching it with any CMS. Newspapers and Magazines are already using multi-user wordpress platforms, same goes for Universities like Harvard, and commercial sites like All Thing Digital.

We’ve just finished building a charity website with WordPress, along with the 3 micro-sites that hang off it. And people who know me, know that I hate building websites. But when you can use something as simple (and yet so powerful) as WordPress, the job becomes easy.

And as far as the client is concerned, because it’s built using an open source platform, anyone can work on it. Additionally, the WordPress community is now so large, more and more plugins are being added by the week, more and more advancements being made and there is a slew of free online information available - to help the novice or the expert.

The best WordPress developers we’ve found (and who we outsource all our work to) are here right in Melbourne. James Farmer heads up a business called Incsub. He also runs one of the largest multi-user WordPress environments on the web today - called Edublogs.

If you’re in the market for a new website, or your existing site is in need of a makeover - I urge you to consider WordPress as the platform.

By all means, let your digital agency do the design and artwork, but insist they build the site using WP. You won’t be sorry.

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.

Click To Play

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.

Click To Play

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.

Click To Play

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…

When you see Matt Mullenweg, the likeable and confident founding developer of Wordpress, you’d swear he was well into his 30’s. The annoying thing is that he’s just 23.

I don’t know about you, but when I was 23, I wasn’t thinking about world domination. I was just grateful that I’d lost my virginity.

But clearly, young guys like Matt and Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook aren’t normal. Hey, they make the founders of Google look old. They make guys like me look ancient.

I had lunch yesterday with some folks from Six Apart - the guys behind Moveable Type and Typepad (the other blogging software). I’m going to try and interview them before I leave here this weekend.

Wordpress is clearly the market leader - and apparently the preferred option for most bloggers. This blog, for instance, is written using Wordpress. I think it’s a cinch to use. And I have the patience of a 4 year old.

I taped all 50 minutes or so of this session, but only posted the first 10. I’ll load the rest to Google Video - given that YouTube still limits you to 10 minute clips.

If you want the link to the full session, just drop me a note. And I’m keen to chat with Matt before I go - given that we’re sponsoring Wordcamp in Melbourne next weekend.

This video is timely, given that tomorrow I’m about to jump on a plane and head to Las Vegas for the years largest gathering of bloggers. I’ll be posting from the event live and those of you who are Wordpress users, or are considering setting up a Wordpress blog should hopefully get something from this quick interview I recently did with James Farmer.

And don’t forget, those of you in Melbourne - Wordcamp is on November 17. All the details are here.

If someone had have told me 2 years ago that I would be flying to Sin City (aka Las Vegas) to attend a blogging conference, I would have thought that they had inhaled an entire bag of weed, let alone a single joint.

Vegas, incidentally, is a city I dislike immensely. And I’m Asian (well, half of me is. Actually the top half - the bottom is African American and that’s the story I’m sticking to).

We Asians apparently love gambling and prostitution. And I can’t walk past a roulette wheel without having a bet. So I should be right at home in Vegas. But it sort of reminds me of a prostrate exam - necessary yet painful. Everything is such a “hustle” in Vegas. And it’s all right there on “the strip”. You know you’re in trouble when you actually land at the airport and right there at the gate, are slot machines with old people propped to one side, obviously using up every last coin in their pockets - hoping for one last chance.

Anyway.

Dave Taylor, who I caught up with earlier this year is one smart blogger. I actually met Dave at an internet gig run by Ken McCarthy. I was so impressed with Dave that I flew back to see him in his home town - and the time he spent with me was invaluable. He told me about Blogworld. I then told him about Avinash. The 2 caught up and voila, Avinash is on the speaking platform at Blogworld.

(By the way, for those page rank desparates, I’m going to find out just what the hell is happening (or happened) with the recent page rank fiasco and I’ll be posting once I’ve interviewed Dave and Avinash and some other smart bastards…more later)

I can’t wait. I haven’t heard from Dave yet as to how many folks are attending, but its a given it will be in the thousands. And there are some serious bloggers in attendance. The irascible Mark Cuban is making an appearance, Mike Arrington from Techcrunch, my good friend Marc Harty, Rich Jalichandra, the CEO of Technorati, GigaOm’s Om Malik, Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress and Australia’s own Des Walsh.

I actually owe an apology to another good internet mate - and that’s Paul Colligan. He blogged from the X10 Seminar way back in September 2004 and I had literally no idea what he was doing, never mind that it, as a medium, would take off like wild fire.

Stay tuned. I’ll be posting live from the event. I just hope the wireless holds up better than it did at Web 2.0.