Lijit

This past weekend, I was lucky enough to speak at WordCamp Denver. What is WordCamp you ask?

Basically, WordCamp is a day (or two) long event where bloggers and developers (specifically Wordpress developers) get together to talk about all things Wordpress.

This was the first time that Denver has hosted a Wordcamp, and Crowd Favorite (the makers of our Wordpress widget) put it all together.

What a great show it was.

It was broken into two segments, the first, in the morning started as WordCamps usually do, with Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Wordpress, giving his “State of the Word” talk. He brought up all the interesting things that the Automattic (the team behind Wordpress) was working on, what the next release of Wordpress would have, and he talked about a couple new resources that were launching, Wordpress.tv and the Wordpress Handbook.

The morning included a panel on web design, with Kevin Menzie (Slice of Lime), Jeremy Harrington (crawlspace|media) and Brian Warren (Be Good, Not Bad). Jane Wells of Automattic talked about Open Source, and right before lunch, one of my favorites, Ben Huh of ICanHasCheezburger who spoke on how his company, Pet Holdings, focuses on the core aspects of their business by outsourcing all technical needs. And he did it without once showing a LOLCat.

In the afternoon, there were two tracks. A technical track and a blogger track. True to Alex King, the technical track was highly technical, with Jake Spurlock and Joe Scott coming in from Utah (Jake spoke on BuddyPress, which one day will be released! Joe spoke on XML-RPC, which might be one of the coolest things ever).

Over at the blogger track, there were a varied subject matter. Boulder’s Jim Turner was on a panel talking about making money blogging; Gil Awsakwa spoke on Media and Publishing, which was especially timely given the recent close of the Rocky Mountain News.

Jon Fox (another Boulderite) spoke about his company Intense Debate and how they are attacking the comment space.

Dave Moyer, an incredibly intelligent and successful kid (and by kid, I think he is 15 years old) spoke on Podcasting. Working at Bitwire, he has become quite the expert on the subject.

At the end of the day, I spoke about Measuring Online Influence, and tried to focus on the reasons why we blog. I have embedded my deck below:

All in all, WordCamp Denver was a great experience. After speaking out at Wordcamp Las Vegas, it was great to get to be involved in a WordCamp closer to home.

If you are interested in attending a WordCamp, check out the upcoming ones. I am speaking at Wordcamps in Chicago and DC, and may be at the ones in San Francisco and New Orleans.

Next weekend, I’m heading to Nashville for the Blissdom Conference and am most excited to be going. In addition to speaking on a panel about blogger outreach, I’ll also have the chance to meet lots of bloggers getting their bliss on. The conference has sold out and the list of activities is impressive. I took a quick look at the attendees and can’t wait to meet the following Lijit users in person…

Her Bad Mother
Complete Organizing Solutions
The Bean
Velveteen Mind
The Inspired Room
Successful Blog
Blissfully Domestic
DesignHER Momma
Alex Year Two

…not to mention having the opportunity to evangelize Lijit to many other bloggers. If you’re going to be at the conference, be sure to send me a note and let me know your t-shirt size. You know I’ll be packing some serious swag with me.

One of the aspects of my position at Lijit is that I get the opportunity to not only attend, but speak at various conferences. I have had the pleasure over the years to present Lijit and things we are working on or believe in at many various conferences.

Luckily, it is not just me. Todd Vernon our CEO, Walter Knapp our COO, as well as Tara Anderson, our Marketing Manager have all had the pleasure to speak at various conferences over the past year or so.

What I have learned is that one thing I really enjoy doing is speaking at conferences. I just spoke at WordCamp Las Vegas, and plan to speak at SXSW (in both cases about Filtering and Discovering Content and Online Influence). Here is a link to my WordCamp presentation.

I have also learned that its not easy to get speaking gigs. Not because people dont want me to speak, but mostly because I am unaware of the opportunities out there.

What I am hoping to do is ask our Lijit community for help:

1) What conferences do you think it would be interesting to have someone from Lijit speak? Recent topics include: Trusted Search, Social Search, Online Filtering and Content Discovery, Personal Branding, and my personal favorite Measuring Online Influence.

2) What conferences should we attend? I know we cant speak at every single one, but there are benefits to us attending various conferences and meeting Lijit users (both current and potential).

Of course, if you are interesting in having Lijit at your conference, drop me a line at micah [at] lijit [dot] com.

After all, trust me, I speak good.

Last night I was interviewed by BloggerSchool on BlogTalkRadio.

It was great to talk all about Lijit. We covered a lot in 30 minutes, which I will summerize here:

• Lijit’s history and Stan’s early concepts about trusted search and content discovery.
• We discussed Lijit’s functionality: search, re-search, our stats and our ad network.
• There was an interesting discussion around content discovery, influence and expertise.
• Revenue was a hot topic and I outlined our ad platform, which unlike other ad platforms, allows publishers to price and sell their own inventory (rather than having no idea as to the revenue they could generate.)
• The importance of having your blog be the center of your universe was another topic of discussion.

Rather than tell you what was said, take a listen!

While Tara was at Chicks Who Click ‘09, I was out in Las Vegas speaking at WordCamp Las Vegas (which occurred during CES, which Todd Vernon, our CEO attended).

Whew!

WordCamp Las Vegas was a wonderful event, where Wordpress users and developers get together to discuss all things Wordpress.

This WordCamp was a bit different in that there was also a good discussion around the business of blogging and social media.

The speaker list was quite the who’s who of social media. Chris Brogan (Lijit User), Liz Strauss (Lijit User), Warren Whitlock (Future Lijit User), Jim Turner (Lijit User), Jim Krukal (Lijit User) and Dave Taylor (Lijit User) all gave highly interesting and informative talks.

My presentation, You Are The Center of Your Universe can be found here.

Luckily, our host, John Hawkins captured it all on Ustream here.

It was great to hang out with Matt Mullenweg (who celebrated his 25th birthday) and the couple of hundred folks the came to the conference.

I am planning on speaking/attending about 4 other WordCamps this year, including Chicago, DC, San Francisco and Denver (I might head down to Dallas as well). Let me know if you are planning on attending a WordCamp and I will bring you a Lijit T-shirt!

By gets, I mean made the unbelievable choice of asking me to speak. At a conference. In front of people.

The truth is, speaking on subjects that I am passionate about is something that I love to do, and I am excited that WordCamp Las Vegas has given me the opportunity to do that.

So what is WordCamp?

Well, as the name implies it is all about the WordPress blogging platform. At a WordCamp, you get to meet lots of WordPress developers and folks that use the platform for really interesting applications.

This year’s speaker line up is fantastic. There are some really heavyweights speaking, and my hope is that some of the bloggers that are currently at CES, will take the time to come visit WordCamp as CES winds down.

What am I speaking on?

Not Lijit. The beauty of WordCamp is that unlike trade shows, the focus is not on vendors or products, but rather users. This was never more clear than when I attended WordCamp SF last year and got to hear developers, theme designers and non-developers talk about all the awesome stuff they were doing. It really helped drive my blogging to a new level.

I decided to speak on a topic that has really been sitting in my brain for awhile. Expertise, Personal Branding and Influence. The title of the presentation (which I will put online) is called: You Are The Center of Your Universe.

Here is the concept (tell me if you think I’m an idiot):

As we create content online we develop our online identity, influence and expertise. Every Flickr photo, every blog post, every link on delicious is a small piece of a complete picture that other people are collecting to determine our influence and expertise. Therefore, it’s imperative that there is some central location where potential clients, friends, colleagues can discover one’s social content in order to truly understand one’s influence/expertise. This is the act of building a personal brand.

Make sense?

Obviously, the best place to create that location is one’s blog, and I will highlight some plugins and techniques to showcase one’s expertise and/or influence.

I’m excited, and I hope others find it interesting.

What do you think?