The Brookston Family Blog
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WordCamp ended up being a pretty fun and worthwhile event. I wasn’t sure what to expect or whether I would feel out of my depth. There were certainly developers and coders who knew exponentially more than I do about blogging but also plenty of beginners whose exposure was much less than my own. So I felt reasonably comfortable at WordCamp. There were several seminars that I got a lot out of and there were really only two negatives. First, nobody ever showed up to talk about WordPress and photoblogging, which was a little disappointing but oh, well.

And second, I didn’t think that the Blogging and Journalism added much. The speaker, Om Malik, a tech writer who runs a for profit site called GigaOM, admitted to having no journalism background apart from having written abut tech issues for traditional media. His experiences generally directly contradicted my own and I felt he was dead wrong about a couple of things he said about news blogging. In particular he felt blogs had to follow traditional journalism rules. To me, blogging and traditional media are two very different methods of communication. Its impossible that they should have the same rules, because they’re not the same thing. It’s like when television first started and they tried using the radio play format. They discovered quickly that what worked on radio didn’t work on TV. The same thing has happened every time a new media has come along. For a great history of this phenomenon, read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Bloggers tend not to get much respect compared to traditional media but in part that’s because the traditional media itself feels threatened by bloggers and thus refuse to take it seriously, even when it’s warranted.

Anyway, apart from that I had a great time and look forward to next year when perhaps I’ll be able to participate more fully.

Matt Mullenweg, the original creator of WordPress.

Musician Eric Haller provided some welcome musical interludes in between seminars on acoustic guitar. He was quite good and did a couple of Beatles’ covers along with some original material. Apparently he did the music for the first film Sean Penn directed.

While I was at WordCamp, Sarah took the kids to get their hair cut. Porter had himself a mop top and Alice needed a little trim to even things out while we figure out what to do with her hair.

You can really only see Alice’s haircut from behind, but she vigorously refused to turn around for a picture, instead fleeing into the relative safety of the inner bathroom.

But she did shoot me some cute looks.

On the other hand, Porter’s haircut was a bit more obvious.

The mirror lets you see both sides of Porter’s new haircut.

As I write this, I’m in downtown San Francisco, at the Swedish American Hall attending WordCamp 2006, an all-day event for bloggers who use WordPress, which is the open source blogging software that I use. So far it’s been fun and there actually are several seminars throughout the day that I’m interested it, which surprised me a little. And even WordCamp is open source, because there’s an extra room that’s open for impromptu meetings and I scheduled one on photoblogging with WordPress, since I’m trying to move my two photoblogs from PixelPost to WordPress right now. WordCamp could also be called NerdCamp, of course, too, but I’m okay with that. And I mean that in the nicest possible way and include myself among the nerdly. I can easily include nerd in my resume of anti-socials names that apply to me.