Justin Kistner

Wordpress ecosystems at WordCamp Portland

Oh man am I looking forward to this Saturday’s WordCamp!! @ahockley and crew have really pulled together something special. Jane from Wordpress will be there to give us an early look at Wordpress 2.7. How sweet is that!?! The famous Lorelle will be there!! Local blogging superstars Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb and Rick Turoczy of SiliconFlorist will be rocking the stage too! And to kick things off, this Friday’s Beer and Blog is going to be a pre-funk party for WordCamp, which is a great opportunity to network with some of the organizers, speakers, and sponsors.

Obviously I’m excited. Part of my excitement is because I’m doing a presentation there. Wordpress has grown from a tool that I used to manage my own blog, to one of the most significant engines powering the blogosphere. My job requires that I help multiple clients with many bloggers each, which is a lot of touch points and variables when dealing with individual installations. My presentation will discuss benefits, strategies, and tactics for weaving together a large number of Wordpress blogs to create an efficient, interoperable communication ecosystem.

The benefits portion will talk about the business value one gains for operating inside an ecosystem. The strategies that I focus on will be about leveraging an ecosystem to coordinate bloggers. Tactically, I’ll be sharing the following:

• A Wordpress MU system with BuddyPress plugins installed to function as a private social network. I’ll share what I had to do to get it into what I considered a working state.
• A Wordpress MU system that functions as a backchannel for working with clients on the content of their blogs.
• An exploration of additional ecosystem functionality and the pitfalls for enterprise application.

This presentation is a big deal to me. Social networks like MySpace and Facebook long ago proved a new level of value emerges when you string together blogs and other social tools. Companies like Ning and others have made it easy to deploy your own social network, but they host and manage it. I’ve been excited about the potential of turning Wordpress into a decentralized social network since I did an Ignite talk requesting a decentralized social network. My hope is that this presentation will provide some of the specific information people need to create social networks that was lacking in my call to action a year ago.

I hope to see you there!

09/24/2008 social media