I’m flying on my last flight back from New York (and thankful that these flights fared better than my incoming flights to LaGuardia). I finally have a little bit of time to rest, recouporate, and put into words all of the ideas, feelings, and emotions that I’ve experienced over the last week. I’ve met a LOT of great people (and I have business cards from all of you, and plan on emailing you personally very soon) as well as learned quite a bit from both the sessions and the expo floor.

Here are some of my top takeaways from BlogWorld, in no particular order.

WordPress is here, and it’s not going anywhere soon.

I was privilaged to be able to contribute to this year’s BlogWorld as a speaker. Two years ago, I applied to be a speaker on my top subjet matter of choice – WordPress. I was declined, but was allowed to speak on a topic that was “blog platform agnostic” (I spoke on “designing a killer blog” and it was received very well – especially for a room of content creators ). Over the course of two years, WordPress became one of the fastest growing blog platforms, then started to chip away at the Content Management System market as well.

This year, I was honored to be welcomed to BlogWorld to speak on WordPress. And I was even more honored (and blown away!) that it was so well received; the room was packed, people were sittin gon the floor, people were waiting in the wings and doorway with cameras, and we stayed twenty minutes into lunch to make sure everyone had their questions answered. It was an experience I’ll never forget.

Social Media “gurus” have… mellowed out over the years.

With a few unnamed exceptions, every one of the speakers and session-goers were interested in one thing: making new relationships. Not just getting a business card to pitch something to them once we all got home, but really striving to make long lasting and heart-felt relationships. I’ve made so many new contacts (and I’ll be honest – meeting and remembering people is something that I don’t excel at – but I am working on it!) and I plan on sending each and every one of them a personal email over the next week (or two… or three). But it’s not just about making new clients; these are people I hope to really connect with until next we meet (and I really hope that next time is BlogWorld LA

Recommendations > SEO (to some)

I know a LOT of SEO experts (REAL ones, not just your fly-by-night hack jobs) and I can honestly say that they do great work. I can also say, however, that when it comes to recommendations, I personally tend to give weight to something recommended to me. That said, I believe that there is a place for both. How else will people be able to find you once you’ve been recommended? “Oh, I know this really awesome WordPress dude – here’s his name”. Said name is Googled, researched, and then hired (at least, that’s the hope). Don’t throw away SEO to invest in Facebook and Twitter, but be mindful of the delicate balance they hold.
Paper.li, by the way, is quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with when it comes to the “curation” (recommending work from creators based on a theme or preference) of content.

The mobile web is the new web

I’m not going to coin the phrase “Web 3.0″ here (God knows that we all hated Web 2.0 – why do you think we call it the “Social Web” now?) but I do see a new wave about to hit the horizon. Mobile (QR Codes and mobile based websites to start) will become more and more important as people ditch their laptops and desktops for on-the-go content consumption with readers, tablets, and smartphones. You can either create a separate mobile site, use a mobile stylesheet to adapt your current site, or just make sure your normal website is compatable with both types (the latter of which being the hardest, but also the most consistant).

People Make Mistakes

Time to address the white elephant in the room. I didn’t attend the Keynote, but I would imagine that Chris Pirillo and Chris Brogan were doing the best that they could given the sitaution. However, if you weren’t happy with it, then by all means tell Rick Calvert or Deb Ng – they are your one-stop hotline to anything with this conference, and I know on good authority that this is the kind of stuff they *need* to hear about. Whatever the reason for it, let them know and hold them to making it better. After all, we do the same thing with our brands and other people we follow; why should we treat the conference different?

Bonus: Syed Balkhi and John Chow are a dangerous duo.

Just had to throw that one out there. Although, if Syed gets together with ANYONE it can be a bit dangerous

At the end of the day, I had one of the most unbelievable conference experiences I’ve ever had. If you weren’t at BlogWorld, then I encourage you to go. The investment of meeting the speakers, and other attendees, can open doors for you that you never imagined. By attending you put your ear to the ground and can hear the pulse of what’s next. Then you can take it back to your readers, or business, and act accordingly. With the advent of blogs, the power of the press has been shifted from the old guard to the “content rebellion”. We have the power to control what media we see, and how it shapes our world. BlogWorld is, and always has been, on the cutting edge of this, and if you aren’t in LA in November, then I know you’ll be missing out.

See you there!

This post is the fifth of an ongoing series entitled “50 Days to a Better WordPress Blog”.  During this time, Mitch will be providing small snippits of code, plugins, and things you can do to make your blog more attractive, attain new readers, and keep old ones coming back time and time again. You can see the entire series here.

I get a lot of questions when I’m speaking on the proper use of tags and categories when it comes to blogging.  How many is too many?  Can I put my post into multiple categories? Should I put my post into multiple categories? What do tags really do?

What’s the Difference?

This question stumps 9 out of every 10 new WordPress users, and even some old users who just never had the courage to ask when they were starting out.  What exactly is the difference between a category and a tag?  Let’s put it into perspective.

Let’s say you’re a potential employee looking at job prospects.  You absolutely want to work at “company x” no matter what that job is.  There’s everything from the CEO all the way down to the Janitor.  You love the company, know everything about it, and would feel very much at home with like-minded people who feel the same way.

That company is a category – it’s a general topic that a post would feel at home with other like-written posts.  Posts about recipes, marketing, or even “just for fun” stuff can all go in the general category.

But what’s this? You are a specialized individual – you can work in any company, as long as it’s the right job.  You could work for “company x” as a copywriter, but you’d be just as happy working for “company y” as a copywriter.  You are a specifically trained person with a specific focus.

The job position is a tag – it’s specific, and spans multiple categories.  You could have tagged a post with “Microsoft” or “Apple” and it be in the “business” category, the “technology category” or any number of other categories that mention either company.

Bottom line rule of thumb: No more than 1 category, no more than 5-7 tags (absolutely no more than 9 max).

Custom Taxonomies

If you feel like you need to split your post off into other categories, consider how you want to sort the content.  If you’re using categories to sort items such as “house size” (for all of you real estate agents) or “operating system”, then you may want to consider using a custom taxonomy.  This lets you define other sorting parameters to help you organize your data.  The code below is an example of a custom taxonomy:

add_action( 'init', 'register_my_taxonomies', 0 );

function register_my_taxonomies() {

	register_taxonomy(
		'os',
		array( 'post' ),
		array(
			'public' => true,                      'hierarchical' => true,                      'labels' => array(
				'name' => __( 'Operating Systems' ),
				'singular_name' => __( 'Operating System' )
			),
		)
	);
}

See the red text?  That controls whether the taxonomy will behave more like a tag (false) or a category (true).  If it behaves like a category, you can have nested, sub-categories.  Taxonomies (as of WordPress 3.1) also generate archive pages just like your standard category pages, and with some extra code you can even rewrite that archive value as well.  Justin Tadlock has a fantastic post on custom taxonomies, if you’re interested.

I can’t even type this post with a straight face – nothing but love to all of my Drupal friends, though!  It has its time and place, but for a blog, WordPress is always the way to go.

The real Day 5 Post is coming soon.

WordPress is, by far, one of the most versatile pieces of software out in cyberspace today. As a developer and designer, my first choice for any project, no matter the scope or purpose, is to see if it’s a job WordPress can handle.  9 times out of 10, it is.  People ask me how software can be so versatile, and how much work is involved to get it that way.  Honestly, it all boils down to the plugins you use, with a few special modifications here and there that most anyone can do.

This year, I’ve made it my mission to show people that WordPress can be used for, well, dang near anything!

Today was a whirlwind day at PodCampNashville.  There were so many great sessions, I saw a lot of great people, and we had a lot of fun at the after party. It’s too soon afterward to really digest things, so I leave you with my session (video is being re-encoded – will have it up ASAP)

I’m finally getting around to debugging and debriefing myself regarding BlogWorldExpo.  There were so many great sessions and speakers that it’s hard to pick just one or two or a few to talk about.  Hopefully this gives me an excuse and great content to write about for a while.

I was talking to Jeremiah Owyang over email about his session (and Blog World in general), and how a lot of people really balked about the point that their customers own their content and control their brand.  I’d never heard a crowd get tense before, but you could literally hear the crowd of business PR managers and marketing people start sweating.  They’d heard it and heard it and heard it, but it took Jeremiah hitting them in the gut to really drive the point across.

But then, over email, he asked me a question I’d never thought of before:

“Imagine if your server got deleted –how would your customers rebuild your website?”

I really don’t know how to answer that, simply because it’s my website, but I wonder… how would you rebuild it?  Would it be the same as it was, or would you tear it apart and rebuild it from the ground up?  Would you want things to be the same as they are, or would a revolution be the end result?

This isn’t a rhetorical question – I am seriously asking this, because I am seriously wanting to know.  Leave your answers in the comments below, and let’s see whether my own website needs a gut check.

Here’s the UStream file of my first session that happened at BarCampMemphis.  The second session lost the stream, and (therefore) my recording was cut.  Sorry!

Free video streaming by Ustream

And here are the slideshows: