WCOC

I went to Word Camp Orange County this weekend. A conference all about WordPress. Super nerdy. Super fun. And I learned a lot.

I went because the company I’m working for (Tripepi Smith & Associates) does a lot of work in WordPress. I’m writing content for them, and the boss wanted me to be able to navigate WordPress so that I could post the content for clients myself.

Well, mission accomplished. I feel absolutely able to work with WordPress now. In addition to some basic WordPress-specific skill seminars I also attended talks on SEO, Content Creation and one titled “Social Media and Social Change” (this one gave me some great ideas for my soon to be launched “Digging Deep” website inspired by the Month Without Monsanto project – I’ll be bloggin more about that soon).

More than anything the day sparked a shift in my head. Until now, I’ve seen every upgrade in technology as a final step. I signed up for Twitter and thought “okay, finally, I’m all up to date, I can relax now.” Then came Twetdeck and I had to muster the energy to try the new technology. Then my boss suggested Hootsuite, which I resisted at first, but now I love.

After listening to the WCOC geeks all day I feel like I’ve come to a new understanding that this is a continual evolution. It won’t ever stop, and though that is in some ways daunting, as long as I can keep flexible and evolve along with the technology, I can (without too much trouble) keep up.

So I’m thinking I’m going to attend the Word Camp in LA in September, too. I think I will probably attend as often as I can. It was a great event. Really well organized. Even the box lunch was delicious. The only thing it was lacking was coffee. I mean, seriously. In a room full of programmers and writers, how on earth can it be okay to put the coffee away at 10am?