You know, I think of myself as a pretty prolific blogger. With over 1,100 posts in under two years, its hard to find others who can match my output. So would it surprise you to learn that even with multiple anti-spam measures in place, there are 100 Spams posted to OMB for every post I write!

That’s right. Akismet alone has saved you guys from reading over 100,000 spam comments, so a big huge thanks goes out to Matt Mullenweg and the gang over at Automattic for offering this service.

Day 2 of WordCamp Dallas started out with a live taping of The WordPress Podcast, featuring hosts Charles Stricklin and Jonathan Bailey with guests Mark Jaquith, Mark Ghosh and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg.

In case I forgot to mention it lately, we want to thank our generous sponsors without whom this event simply wouldn’t have been possible (please spread the link love):

• Layered Technologies
• Find My Host
• 3Tera
• Automattic
• B5Media

And also to Tom Kraemer, the City of Frisco’s AV Manager who worked tirelessly all weekend to record all of the WordCamp videos.
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I was very pleased to work with Charles Stricklin this year on organizing the WordCamp Dallas 2008 event held at City Hall in Frisco, TX.

A very special Thank You goes out to Mayor Mike Simpson and the entire City Council for allowing the event to be held in the Council Chambers. And also to Tom Kraemer, the City’s AV Manager who worked tirelessly all weekend to record and catalog all of the WordCamp videos which I’ll be posting over the coming days.

We also need to thank our generous sponsors without whom this event simply wouldn’t have been possible (please spread the link love):

• Layered Technologies
• Find My Host
• 3Tera
• Automattic
• B5Media

The first speaker at WordCamp this year was Matt Mullenweg, and he gave a lecture on “WordPress 2.5 and Beyond”.
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Today I’ll be attending WordCamp Dallas, which Charles Stricklin and I jointly organized. We’ve got a whole line up of fantastic speakers including Matt Mullenweg, Jonathan Bailey, Cali Lewis and Neal Campbell, Liz Strauss, Lorelle VanFossen, Chris Smith, Aaron Brazell, Jacob Santos, and Mark Ghosh.

If you’re one of the WordCamp attendees and you happen to be sitting in the lecture hall reading along as I stand here on stage, well… deja vu! Otherwise, for my normal readers here comes a list of 45 Ways to Power Up Your Blog! If all goes well we’ll be recording the lecture and will be able to append the video to this post later.
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Yes, in case no one knew it, I’m blowing the secret wide open. Today (January 11) is Matt Mullenweg’s birthday, and I just want to wish him the best for the new year. For those of you that don’t know, Matt is the original creator of WordPress - the software that makes this (and over 2,000,000 others) blog possible.

So happy birthday Matt! And I hope all the other bloggers out there will pick up on this and pass along their wishes also. I would have sent you a cake, but the kid in the photo ate it before I could get it to you…

Dan Kuykendall provided the first lecture on Podcasting at the WordCamp 2007 conference on Saturday July 21, 2007 at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco, CA.

Dan spoke about the theory and practice of podcasting and how to apply it directly to WordPress using his plugin PodPress.
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What do you do when your blog goes from a thousand pageviews a day to a million? Well, you start out by watching this video of a lecture on HyperDB and High Performance WordPress given by Barry Abrahamson and Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp 2007, in which they explain how they scale WordPress.com across hundreds of servers and constantly tweak and improve performance.

This lecture occurred on Sunday July 22, 2007 from 10am-11am in San Francisco, CA at the Swedish American Hall.
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This one hour session, entitled State of the Word, from the WordCamp 2007 conference features Matt Mullenweg giving an update on the current state and future plans for WordPress.

This lecture occurred on Sunday July 22, 2007 from 3:30-4:30pm in San Francisco, CA at the Swedish American Hall. Matt gave the updates and then allowed those in attendance to ask questions and make comments.
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This was the last one hour session, entitled Developer Duke-out, from the WordCamp 2007 conference conducted by Matt Mullenweg and featuring Mark Jaquith, Donncha O Caoimh, Michael Adams and Andy Skelton.

The Developer Duke-out occurred on Sunday July 22, 2007 from 4:30-5:30pm in San Francisco, CA at the Swedish American Hall and it gave everyone the chance to get to know a little more about some of the people behind Wordpress as well as have the opportunity to ask questions and make suggestions.

The guys talk about some of their favorite plugins, the current and future state of WordPress, and a number of other interesting and at time comical issues.
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This is a video of the one hour long lecture given by Matt Cutts at the WordCamp 2007 conference in San Francisco, CA two weeks ago on the topic of Whitehat SEO tips for Bloggers.

For those not familiar, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and this lecture is all about ways to make your Web site rank higher in Google and the other search engines. I’ve also written an article on this topic called Improving Search Engine Rankings over at HTMLHelp.com.

Matt’s presentation is available here, and when I get a chance I’ll try to go back and plug them into the video in the appropriate spots. In the meantime I did manage to get most, if not all, of them on film although they might be a little difficult to read - especially in the low quality versions required by the video hosting sites.
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As many of you may recall, last weekend I was in San Francisco attending the Wordpress user conference called WordCamp. Well, I had a brief chat with Matt prior to attending and we decided that it would be a good idea to capture the lectures on video, so I went ahead and took my gear with me and played cinematographer for the weekend.

This first video which I’m releasing (they are coming out in no particular order) was actually the second session filmed on July 21, 2007 from 11am-noon at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco, CA. John C. Dvorak and Om Malik led a public discussion entitled “Blogging vs. Journalism“.
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