The Challenge

Live! WordCamp Argentina 2007

Published by Esteban Glas on October 31st, 2007 | This post lacks all category except for: Blogs, Business, Web 2.0

Testing how this Word 200t blog feature Works. 9:24 and this is about to start. Mariano is introducing Matt.

Matt is providing some background on how the first WordCamp got organized; surprise, surprise more than 200 people showed up on occasion. WordCamps also held in China, and Philippines, now the turn comes to Argentina.

“I’m here to talk about the advantages of using TypePad”. Spanish is the second language behind English. 1.700.000 Mill monthly visits on Spanish WordPress.com blogs already.

Release cycle is aimed to have a major release every 4 months. 2.3 is latest release. Added tagging and update system. This is a really cool feature for all of us who sustain a couple of blogs (note to self: I need to upgrate…).

There are over a thousand plugins on the plugin directory. 50+ added every week.

“People are doing things that are not at all a blog with wordpress”. He also predicted what has just made a headline on Tech Crunch: Google Open Social is due to launch on Thursday.

“Backpress” is going to be a universal backend for social sites, allowing users to do more things than “just blog”.

GPL-type license is an enabler to allow things to scale and grow. Matt calls it the “dot org boom”. “The real opportunity for open source is going to be outside the US”. The license is the common base.

Wordpress 2.4 has a complete re-work for the backend.

Leo Preito is the next speaker up.

Leo talks about how he got introduced into the web world, how he created an agency and how he resigned to that when it became a “sausage factory”. He created FayerWayer because there were no good Tech sites in Spanish.

Leo is taking about Tomás Poolak, his guru for WordPress. This guy developed an aggregator for WordPress blogs, with different access levels.

The 2 reasons they had for switching from MovableType to WordPress were: speed and open source. Wordpress allows customizations far beyond what proprietary software would ever be able to release. The bonus reason for the change of platform is Akismet

FayerWayer was created over a weekend, and it just boomed. Fayer Wayer has different plugins, amongst them, paged comments.

Every time he goes to a new company they go with the tale of “the world has changed” and the odd thing is that technology companies have no clue whatsoever.

They’ve put up the “frente de liberación digital”, as a response to the Chilean government closing a deal with M$ to centralize all computer operations on the country. After putting up some social media applications people organized themselves in less than 10 days and presented a case in court to prevent the deal.

When FayerWayer was hacked they lost a full week worth of posts and comments. It was the users who sent their records, screenshots and data to rebuild what they lost. The bottom Line is community works.

The next speakers will talk on Blogging and Journalism

Vanina Berghella is the first to speak. Opening up to the public and the public claiming to have their own voice. “Can journalism happen on blogs?” Of course the answer is yes. My personal take is that you should ask any major newspaper on the world and let them answer you how threatened they feel about all this web 2.0 jumbayala. She predicts the end of traditional press. Really? C’mon!

Now it’s the turn for the second speaker, Gastón Roitberg, with a more radical and accurate point of view, IMHO. There’s a lack for a blogging policy in mass media in Argentina. I guess that is a common thing elsewhere.

For mass media Bloggers are no longer “weirdos”, but people worth listening to.

He does not feel blogs are a threat to “traditional” media. Mass media is using blogs as another tool in their arsenal. Although the writing style on those blogs isn’t yet as relaxed as it is elsewhere in bloggistan.

He’s working on training and masters for the journalists on La Nación to help them to close the technological gap between the journalists and the scary reality.

Audience question: when to refrain from publishing something in a blog. That is an excellent question. Not only for journalists, but also for all of us who are employed by corporations. My common sense tells me when no to talk about something, and I’ve only had to regret 1 unfortunate event in over a year in that regard.

Almost 3 hours in here already, and I still have more than 50% battery left. God save the extended battery.

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