Last Saturday a handful of Web Dept.members went on a field trip to Fremont. A bustling community North of downtown Seattle, where Adobe has quite a large facility, WordPress held their first “WordCamp Seattle” event. It was a day of everything WordPress, blogging and social networking. Laptops were hard at work sending tweets out into cyberspace about the various topics and events covered by speakers like Chris Pirillo, Jane Wells and Ian Lurie.

Because there were five InsideOuters at the event, we had the chance to break up and attend different speakers covering subject matters that most applied to our job descriptions and interests. Katie, Gail and Laura attended Aaron Hockely’s presentation on how to successfully launch a blog, while Kailey and Corey went to hear about WordPress plugin programming.

Scott Porad of icanhascheezeburger.com was also a speaker, and Mark Jaquith spoke on WordPress’ version of Facebook, BuddyPress. There were also spontaneous sessions on a variety of topics, many of which included Twitter. Gail attended one about the legal repercussions of using others content. She said she broke out in a cold sweat at how easy it is to break copyright laws on the web!

The day ended with some “ignite” sessions: tiny 5-minute presentations on a variety subjects, ranging from self-hosting to various methods for creating WordPress themes. These were fun. Lively, and a great way to cover several subjects quickly. Laura and Katie commented that they would have enjoyed some of these presentations at regular speed in another half hour session.

The last speaker was Liz Strauss. She was almost more like a motivational speaker than someone speaking about effective blogging; she echoed the theme of being yourself on your blog. After all, that is why people come to your blog, to hear what YOU have to say.

Overall, it was a great chance to make some interesting contacts in the Pacific Northwest WordPress Community, and learn some new information from other WordPress users.