Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

I have never been a great photographer and my new HD Kodak camera makes it 50 times more difficult to take a good picture, so that disclaimer aside, here are a few pictures from WordCamp RDU.  I have some video also (much better stuff) that I hope to post soon.

I have these on Facebook as well, if you want to tag someone or yourself, connect with me at facebook.com/brettbum

Here’s the speaking and events schedule for WordCamp RDU 2009!

PRE-EVENT GATHERING

Please come out and meet your fellow presenters, our WordCamp sponsors and selected guests.  Tyler’s location (American Tobacco Historic District) is really cool and you can even catch the game while you enjoy a few drinks and some good food.

Tyler’s Tap Room

324 Blackwell St

Durham, NC 27701

(919) 433-0345

7pm-9pm

WORDCAMP SESSION SCHEDULE

Please remember that you may be in a session time slot based on whether or not your topic is considered Advanced or Beginners.  I tried to place at least one of each in every time slot, with the topics that cross over added in between.

9am-9:45am – Registration/Breakfast

9:45am-10:15am – WCRDU Welcome/Opening Statements/Host Statements

10:15am-11am – Phillip Barron / Andy Beal / Glenn Ansley

11am-11:45am – Angela Connor / Shayne Sanderson

11:45am-12pm – Sponsor Announcements (Full Throttle)

12pm-12:45pm – Hal Goodtree / Brett Bumeter / Chris Gatewood

12:45pm-1:00pm – Sponsor Announcements (ConnectNC)

1:00pm-1:45pm  – (really until 2pm but right before 2pm I am going to call people together)

Lunch / Announcements (Goodtree, Andy Beal as event sponsors)/ Giveaways

2pm-2:45pm – Wayne Sutton (Tweetshop)

2:45pm-3pm – Announcements/Giveaways

3pm-3:45pm – Lew Ayotte / Beth Morgan / Jason Keath

3:45pm-4pm – Announcements/Giveaways/Keynote Intro

4pm-5pm – Matt Mullenweg Keynote

5pm-5:45pm – Alan Knox / Michael Torbert

5:45pm-6pm – Final Announcements / Final Giveaways

Plus here is a partial list of sponsors twitter id’s (will update more as I get consolidated list)

@KitsUnlimited @ConnectNC @Digsby @AndyBeal @Hal990 @CommunityGirl @mwalters @brettbum @waynesutton

WordCamp RDU Location

School of Education, NCCU
712 Cecil Street
Durham, NC 27707

This weekend Brett Bumeter will be attending the StarUp Holden Beach event. 

This a two and a half day event whereby multiple teams of designers, developers, marketers, & entrepreneurs are formed to pitch a business plan idea, vote on a plan to develop, and then sit down and work the weekend building the business plan.

At the end of the weekend the team can decide whether or not they want to pursue a business venture. 

StartUp Holden Beach is organized under the StartupWeekend framework.

About

Startup Weekend is a conference unlike any you’ve attended before–over the course of a single weekend, you get to take time out from your current venture/business and practice building a new one.

Over the course of the weekend, ideas are pitched, teams are formed, and new companies conceptualized, built, and launched!  Each person improvises using their own instruments and style to create something entirely new and wonderful–all in one brief session.

StartUp Holden Beach Attendees

To give you a better idea about how this all comes together here’s a copy of the tentative agenda.

Saturday, June 6, 2009
5:00 p.m. – Check into the beach house (Optional early check in if you want to settle into your room at the beach house before getting started; otherwise, you can settle in at the end of the night)
6:00 p.m. – Meet-n-Greet; Hors d’oeurves & Drinks provided
7:30 p.m. – Pitches Start after brief thank you and message from KTEC/SITAKS
8:15 p.m. – Pitches end, teams form, assigned to work spaces

Sunday, June 7, 2009
9:00 a.m. – Breakfast
12:00 p.m. – Lunch & Quick Group Check up
7:00 p.m. – Startup Weekend HB Luau

Monday, June 8, 2009
9:00 a.m. – Breakfast
12:00 p.m. – Lunch & Quick Group Check up
5:45 p.m. – Work on projects should end
6:15 p.m. – Final presentations
7:30 p.m. – Dinner on your own

We held the third Lab on the Lake today on the topic of Networking your blog while building traffic.  This session ended a little early due to rain, but over all we covered the large part of this topic.  The next Lab on the Lake is 5-29(Friday) covering the topic of WordPress Installation and Configuration Join the group for free or rsvp now.

Resources:

• Greater Charlotte Area WordPress Meetup Group
• Blog Surfing Networks
• Comment Kahuna
• BlogCatalog

Below are some text transcripts that are very rough and intended primarily to help people find this video via search.

Everybody this is Brett Bumeter, and I am coming to you from Lake Wylie, North Carolina. This is a down the River comics covers is done and I live in Belmont now going to just cross that river or lake from Charlotte North Carolina today. We’re going to be talking about networking your blog while building traffic in general. On the topic that were going to be covering today is a relevant. A relatively fundamental topic and logging and it involves. What I would call of some Web one .oh methodology. Today we have a lot of social media networks out there that help people learn how to network their blog. Promote what they’re doing, and one of the good things, but there was a time before social media hit for Web two .oh functionality. It wing bloggers just wrote articles, and they had other ways of networking with each other in some of those ways still exist for people starting out in blogging. It can actually be relatively useful to try some of those out partly understand where we’ve come from production where we’re going, and partly just to see what’s happening up there on the web because there’s a lot of older bloggers are people that have been blogging for a long time that haven’t all embrace the new social media tools that are out there some great writers that are good writers but not good networkers. And there’s some people out there that are great writers that don’t know how to use of the social media tools that exist. So I’m not knocking that one way or another, but I do want to show you some things that people used to use Angelo’s things you can still use today to good advantage. So I’m just kind of have to step back of my name is Brett Bumeter. And I blog or work from an office here on the lake and its actually a WiFi fishing dock, and we offer lab sessions where people can come in and sit down with me. And we can help teach you how to write a blog builder blog install a blog. Even design your own WordPress theme with a number of things with WordPress from web design to blog management to content management systems, and I also run a local WordPress meet a group. So one of the things that we found is that there were a lot of people coming to our meet ups that were interested in WordPress or blogging or number of related topics, but they were missing some fundamental information so we so some of these lab on the lake session where people come and give people a time and receive some training or mentoring or whatever it is they needed and I setting unlike relaxin environment can move on from there. So that’s overdoing today, kicked things off by taking a look at some of the basics of blog network. Now, in general, take a half step back of blog. Often times. It’s like a conversation, some people like to confuse blogging with a journalism and blogging the tool it can be used for journalism, but it doesn’t have to be. I can just be a one to many conversation from a person that writes the blog article to everyone that reads it in some cases those readers will even respond and comment back on talking to the blogger and that could spiral into a longer conversation. So if we think of a blog is a conversation, networking is a natural outcome of that conversation because people will need to find other people to talk to to have that conversation have to talk to somebody otherwise know is that conversation. So there are some tools that were developed some years back that help bloggers essentially list their blogs within a network and it enabled other bloggers as well as people enjoyed reading those blogs to randomly go through. View the blogs see the most recent articles, leave comments a number of that sort I go through. Couple those tools and how they work their were some networks as well that not only did that but they actually offered something that I might call a marketing service and that they were helping those bloggers get more traffic, and I’m not going to cover really the ethics of how that might be good bad or otherwise. But you should be aware that some of these networks were used for that purpose and still are today. The thing about that type of situation is there are times when that traffic can look spammy or it can look particularly the cheaper false to advertisers that might want to advertise on your site. So if you’re actually looking to build quality traffic people that are really interested in what you are writing people that are really interested in what you’re talking about and from your advertisers perspective people that are actually real people that might be interested in the products they advertise. Then, some of these networks that we might point out are probably not be for you. I’m not trying to encourage spam by a long shot, but I do want to show you the networks and help you understand the good the bad and everything in between, so you’ll understand the tools and know-how to use them while because there are couple of them can be used to very good advantage. And you can even bathe and actually deserves to help clean out some of the spammers and the blogosphere is going to. So let’s take a look at a couple of the blog surfing networks is what I liked: some people call them blog surfing exchanges were blog exchanges and I’m going to come into my site as often media. And I went to go to the intermediate-range section on the blog surfing networks. Take a look at this page on this page is to a long list of the ways that did this and many of them have gone out of business. Even some relatively large ones, but there’s still a handful route I’ve actually got three listed here by do-gooders. Probably a dozen more, but there’s three different ones here, one of them is called blog explosion, and one of them is called click pirates and one of them is called blogsoldiers now from their names alone, you might be able to infer couple different things. What may or may not be apparent is that blog explosion is probably one of the least spammy blog surfing exchanges out there. There was a time when they were actually very integral in shielding and cleaning out some of the spam on the blogosphere. They don’t wear that hat as much these days, partly due to the explosion of social media that they do help in a number different situations to help bloggers. See what other types of blogs are out there screen out what is normally decent content on those blogs and help bloggers network is radically them first. So I’m going to, click here and move over to blog explosion. Now, I’m not going to walk through the process of establishing an account with blog explosion through this tutorial on to establish an account of blog explosion basis of user profile. You list your blog and some information about your blog and someone from blog explosion will eventually review your site confirm that it’s a real blog and not pornography or spam or something like that. And then they will list you in the directory now. Blog explosion chose instead to the top. You can see that they have approximately 92,000 blogs in their directory, and of those those are people who submitted fifteen thousand have been reviewed. So not everybody that Smits gets in. That’s a good thing because there’s a lot of garbage blogs out there. Now they have a blogs visited number of thirty-five million that means blogs on their list here have been viewed thirty-five million times the bed. Submitted reviewed excepted and visited by people that use the blog explosion service. So that’s quite a bit of visitors, but the service is also the proper number of years. The site is relatively simple to navigate going to login here remember my password. That would definitely

This week we are kicking off two more Labs on the Lake.  This week we will hold two labs.  One today, Monday(5-18 at 2pm est), covering the topic of Blog Monetization, walking through some blog revenue sources, adding some new ones to the list and giving some advice on how to navigate these options which can be murky on a good day. [Meetup RSVP link] 

This like many of our topics will be covered several times.  Blog Monetization is definitely not something that can be covered in a single day, let alone a single lab.  Many people are looking for ways to earn extra money, raise revenue to market their companies more, or even start their own business.  We will help people get started with the process of making money with a blog (a blog is required to follow along with this lab in person or on our live show at Mogulus.com/wificove ).

Then on Thursday(5/21 2 pm est) we are going to cover the topic of building traffic through networking.  [Meetup RSVP link]

Again this is a very deep topic and one we will revisit many times in the future, but you can tune into either lab at 2 PM est or if you are in the Charlotte area, RSVP through our Meetup group (cost $5 to attend) and spend an afternoon on the lake learning some great web skills that will make you money.

We are following up on our first Lab on the Lake last week, which covered WordPress Installation, WordPress Configuration, & WordPress Theme design with our favorite WordPress Theme Generator-Artisteer.  The video from this event (our first live broadcast) didn’t take to well, but we got the bugs worked out the next night when we held our weekly WordPress Meetup in Charlotte and do expect this weeks events to go off without a hitch.