At last years TEDxAkl event one of the best presentations was by Scott Gilmour of “ihaveadream”

I’ve had the pleasure of hanging out with Scott before and so when the programme opened at Wesley I took my daughter along for a look. She goes to a decile 10 school not that far away from Wesley but a world away in terms of opportunity and outcomes.

That is – unless some of us help out to change the odds. I have a dream aims to inspire the whole school and related community by helping a whole class.

“Each local “I Have a Dream”® project adopts one entire year level from the founding Primary School. They work with this group of children (“the Dreamers”) and their families year-round from their primary school years through university. Each project has its own unique Project Sponsor(s), its own full time Project Co-ordinator, and its own group of dedicated and committed volunteers.”

“In 2003, the first “I Have a Dream”® project outside of the USA started up at Wesley Primary School in Mt Roskill, a suburb of Auckland, New Zealand.”

Scott presented at #tedxakl ’09 last year – here is the video of that presentation.

I’m helping out on TEDxAkl “ideas worth spreading” 2010 this year. You can get your TEDxAkl tickets over here. No essay required this year.

Here are some very timely work / life balance insights for those of us over 30 any age – from Nigel Marsh.

Meaningful engagement takes effort and a level of conscious attention that we all need to work at. I love being a Dad but juggling a business and a life takes a real mind shift.

There are more than a few laughs here – life is not a destination it is a journey and we need to be present and engaged now.

“Nigel Marsh is the bestselling author of “Fat, Forty and Fired” and “Overworked and Underlaid” and the Regional Group CEO of Young and Rubicam Brands for Australia & New Zealand. Finding the balance between work and life is an ongoing battle.”

I’m really looking forward to TEDxAuckland on Sunday 26th September  2010. I will be helping to get the word out and hoping to see you all there if you are in Auckland that weekend.

This year you can get tickets from Ticketek there is no registration process. If you were there last year TEDx Auckland 2009 media is here.

In the meantime enjoy Nigel’s talk.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I really enjoyed Brett Solomon’s talk at TEDx Sydney 2010. Brett  is the co-founder and Executive Director of Accessnow.org. He takes us on an internet freedom tour. A few surprises here.

I’m wondering if the debate on internet filtering in Australia  had any effect on the election there. What do you all think? If Labour have lost then Senator Conroy is gone but the debate may not be over.

That election took place yesterday but this morning – still to close to call although it looks like Labour has lost and while Seventy six seats are required for victory in the 150 seat Parliament that just may be a too hard.

“Brett Solomon is co-founder and Executive Director of Accessnow.org – a new global movement for digital freedom. Born out of the aftermath of the 2009 Iranian election, Access uses cutting edge technologies to help people living behind the firewall, provides thought leadership on the new frontier of digital rights, and is building a mass global citizens’ movement which advocates for internet freedom.

Brett was Campaign Director at Avaaz.org, a global political web force which has rapidly grown into the largest online activist community in the world at 3.6 million subscribers in all 193 countries. Brett was the first Executive Director of GetUp!, an Australian political organisation of over 300,000 people, worked as Campaign Coordinator at Amnesty and founded Oxfam’s International Youth Parliament.”

from TEDx Sydney speakers

Click here to view the embedded video.

Update: It looks like Tony Abbott might be the new Aussie PM.

If Labour has had a  -5.5% swing against them then they should step aside but we won’t know for a few days or weeks.  The early results may be incorrect but it is not looking good for Labour. What will the Greens do ?

Dave McClure over at 500hats is always a good read. His posts on reinventing venture capital there and at various conferences make a great deal of sense.

I really liked MoneyBall for Startups a recent very long essay – which is an essential read if the future of business is your thing.

“the primary issue is that investors of all shapes and sizes have become incredibly lazy and complacent over the past two decades, measured by both activity and by IRR.  Meanwhile, the consumer internet has brought a tsunami of technological & behavioral change which has resulted in stunning reductions in time & cost needed to distribute products and services to the over 2-3B connected people on the planet.”

On a recent visit to Silicon Valley and San Francisco I was personally struck by the gap between the incredible resources on offer and the sorts of projects that I saw pitched.

In my personal view I know NZ and Australian businesses who could do a whole lot better than what I saw at Web 2.0 and generally around. On the other hand I did meet some extremely smart people who are doing very well and in time will write about them as well.

There are better ways to measure all of this and I did see an applied math project that got me very excited.

Of course- it is not quite as simple as that but Dave McClure is the go to guy on these and related topics.

If you have less time and you want to try the more gentle option the slideshow below may suit.

If you enjoy reading Dave McClure you should check out David Cowan on Startups

When my daughter was 3 she used to ask what I did for a job. She has a much better idea now but to keep things simple I used to say something like this.

“I talk with people, I take lots of notes. Then some web stuff.”

Fairly often now some of this takes place all at the same time. Live twitter streams from events are now part of the (new) media mix.  Services like Be in the Room can aggregate social media feeds and we can take questions from external observers via the use of hashtags.

Here is recent example (August 4th) from the Unitec Forum for the Future series on Auckland Super City debates. Look at earlier posts on theDomm website for more about that event and/ or follow on twitter @UnitecFTF At the UnitecFTF those who couldn’t be there asked questions via twitter.

This was the 6th forum event so far. More are planned. Noted business commentator and journalist Rod Oram is the chair for the event and Associate Professor & Head of Department Rob Davis deserves full credit for being the catalyst & firestarter on this project.

As this debate took place in a TV studio with lots of outside media present some of this was captured on video. I even got a rare chance to see myself at work because when you are on live streaming it all tends to be a bit of blur in the moment.

The super city changeover for Auckland is an important change and  it deserves better, smarter, more engaging media and new media engagement.

Well done Unitec cast and crew for making a difference.

At WordCampNZ I was planning to talk about what I do most of the time which is online marketing projects integrated with WordPress.

On the day I talked more about the logistics around WordCamp rather than the stats & case studies I had planned to do.

My business is focussed at the marketing end of the scale and so I use email tools especially Campaign Monitor and MailChimp plus various other social media plugins to make it as easy as possible for customers and partners to engage with each other.

Again not having enough time (or sleep) I mentioned these WordPress plugins in passing.

This is the partly the presentation that I had planned but on the day it seemed more important to go wider and talk about WordCampNZ future planning.

1. Google Analyticator is one of my favourite plugins as it gives a rolling 30 day view of GA on the WordPress dashboard. This saves going into the google account which not many of my customers want to do. The plugin has role settings and so that desktop widget can be rolled down to below admin and editors if that is what you want to do.
2. FB Like is Facebook like plugin that we use on WordcampNZ. I like it (sorry about the pun.) Much as I personally have mixed views about Facebook (privacy & commerce) there is no doubting the huge clout it has when someone that you know likes or comments on stuff we all care about. (see also my post from June 06 Trust & verify on trust cues.)
3. Backtype Connect is another plugin that is used extensively to feed in the twitter and other social streams into blogs. Part of the reason we use it is that it provides some twitter analytics which is a growing area of interest for many businesses. Have a look at these analytics for the post on Richard Hollingnum.The other reason I / we use Backtype is that some of the automattic people invested in it. (P.s you may need to setup a free account with Backtype if you can’t see the full set of stats)
4. In passing I also referred to VaultPress for backups and VideoPress for video hosting also very much worth checking them out.
5. WordPress Mobile Edition plugin from Alex King is one of my favourites. I don’t mind reading the instructions as there is a theme part and a plugin part. So this plugin needs a FTP whiz to do upload. Auto install won’t get the theme part in the right location.

The other point to remember with these kinds of lists is that plugin versions and WordPress versions are a moving target and do change.

This means that – as always there might be a particular combination of versions that may not work with your theme or other setup configuration.

Congrats to Bill Bennett for his piece on Writing for the web in 300 words one of my favourites and now I’ve just hit 482 so time to publish.

One of the best jobs I ever had was Research & Analysis Director for a merchant banking company back in the early ’90s. Until then it hadn’t really occurred to me that I could get paid for thinking as work.

My current business tagline is “thinking & planning for marketing success”.

Consequently my wardrobe is mostly t-shirts with think or something similar written on them.

At #wordcampnz 2010 there was a serendipitous moment when I was standing near the screens about to introduce Richard Hollingum from Department of Doing and TEDX Auckland

Richard had up a screen saying I’ve been thinking and I was wearing my favourite REMO t-shirt Think

Kristina DC Hoeppner caught that moment.

“@dialogCRM you made it onto my pic of the day: http://bit.ly/dxGh8e – thanx for all your hard work for prep, the event and now follow-up”

The full set of Wordcampnz 2010 photos by Kristina is on Flickr over here
I blogged about it on behalf of #wordcampnz 2010 over here

Many of you know that I have been very busy working on #wordcampnz for the past 3 months. We just hosted 110+ of you at Unitec in Mt Albert on all things related to WordPress and the users.

These are my personal thoughts however a version of this post will soon be over on the WordCampNZ.

As one of the organisers and the Auckland based host thought I’d give a bit more background on what we are doing here & where it might go to in the future.

Background

First up thanks for all the feedback – offline and online about – everything related to #wordcampnz.

On content of presentations can we say that we haven’t done our our jobs right if you don’t hate some of the presenters / presentations – because at the very same time others in the audience are loving it. It is a user generated conference and each user has a slightly differing perspective.

There is really only a problem if everyone likes all presentations. That means we are being mediocre and playing it way too safe.

This year we picked wordcampnz speakers that we thought would enlighten, engage, inspire and surprise and we expected some of them might even push some other buttons. These people are just like bloggers.

Wait – they are bloggers – and all of them blogging in one way or another. Like them you can have a blog in 30 seconds and away you go. Join the revolution any time you want.

“There are over 25 million WordPress publishers as of June 2010: 11.4 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com plus 13.8 million active installations of the WordPress.org software.”

See usage stats for WordPress over here . This is all great but core contributors are in the low hundreds and as a community -we need to do better and get plugin & theme developers paid. Many plugin developers give away 95% of their plugins with no donations at all and that is just plain wrong.

This is not a beat up (just quietly) but a reality check is needed on many open source projects, not just the WordPress one. We all need to make more donations to developers and hire them for bigger projects when we get the chance. So please do check out those speakers.

While talking with the local WordPress community we did also come across a few awesome developers & contributors who are a tad burnt out & sadly couldn’t make it this time.

Last year we did the first #wordcampnz users event in Wellington at the Mt Vic Bowling Club. Around 110 locals and others attended including Matt Mullenweg

The really cool thing about #wordcampnz 2010 is that 90% of you were not at Wellington last year.

And its not because you are WordPress newbies. Once again we are awestruck by the talent & sites we’ve seen. Just at random check out Sam at Boolean Gareth Price – WorkWorkWork Lee at leetewal who all made it and Slamxhype who couldn’t be here.  Adam from Slamxhype started in Grey Lynn & is now huge in London, Tokyo, New York and all around the world.

TED Blog is on WordPress – see the showcase details over at WordPress.org.

What is Next?

WordCampNZ is all voluntary with a core group of trustees plus volunteers who all helped out on the day. We registered a charitable trust and we need some accounting and other resource to keep all of that sweet. Thanks to all of those who did help.

I know some WordPress developers are working up to 18 hrs a day on keeping their clients happy. Often they are the very same people who help out on wordcamps and the like.

Many of us work on low budget projects cos we like them but that doesn’t cut it with the bank manager or the accountants so (as a community) we do need to get better organised.

Juggling passion and business is a balancing act. This morning my daughter asked me how much $ I make in my job and I did my best to explain that it is not always about the $. That for me and many of us with families we plan our day around being able to be there for them as much as possible. Being with your family and being “present” when you are there is not always easy but it is extremely rewarding.

Many of the #wordcampnz community are highly action oriented. For my own business I love working with non-profits and causes because they are highly focussed.  They don’t have the big budgets so they need to make every media interaction and contact work.

If you came along to #wordcampnz 2010 and didn’t get enough (technical) detail please be aware that the speakers & presenters do need to get paid for their hard won IP at some time. We will put up some slides from this years event however some of the slides will be slightly different that what was presented for that reason.

No one is complaining. However…

It would be great to get some new trustees & share the workload a bit better. Anthony is now living in Melbourne. To put it in perspective he was 18 when he co-organised WordCamp Australia in Nov 2008. Hats off for that. Dan’s company Instinct is sitting on a rocket ship with more than 500,000 downloads of the wp-ecommerce plugin. So Dan is way busy. I have some adventures of my own that I’m excited about and so it is a good time to get wider community involvement on the organising side. To help with that we will get a work list out.

We are extremely grateful for our corporate sponsors Unitec, MagnumMac, DPS, Sitehost, AllGoodBananas and others like TweetTwins, Vaughn Davis, Catherine Arrow, Fraser at BrightMindLabs, Idealog Magazine.

The person who bought in the chocolate cake deserves a medal

Berend de Boer says on twitter

“#wordcampnz was very political, far too many greenie causes, and even someone running for political office, potentially a $60,000 job.”

“A #wordcampnz was quite different from a #drupal event, far more for wordpress users than wordpress developers”  on twitter

But wait – the cake came from one those political greenies and was a really nice thing to do.

Thanks also Berend for the compliment about the event being more for users. That is exactly why so many “regular” non-developers use WordPress. But with a full day of tech related sessions in room 2 (also for designers) we did cover most of the development stream. There were also 2 open source developers that we had hoped could make it but in the end they didn’t.

We did have a couple of sessions that could have been swapped over e.g Security should have been in tech room and Dan’s e-commerce presentation was probably more general. However security is an important topic and we wanted to pay close attention to that.

In my personal view having content with a cause or causes makes it real and passionate people make better speakers. My personal highlights were Courtney Lamberts oprah exercise and Justin & Sam from Vitallink. Richard from Dept of Doing all made my top 3 but everyone was good.

Content anywhere and especially online is really hitting the spot when it gets people off their butts and prompts them into action.

With your permission we would like to send out a monthly email to keep the #wordcampnz conversation going.It would also be really useful if we can implement BuddyPress and use that locally in NZ and Australia to link up the WordPress communities here.

GigaOM Pro is the kind of BuddyPress site that we should be able to use and develop in ANZ

We will keep up the social media and there are well advanced plans for two wordcamps in Wellington and Melbourne in about 6 months time.

More about that later but the general plan is to combine resources for ANZ so we can cover more territory and get you some speakers from the US, UK and elsewhere.

Thanks again. Please let me /us know your comments. Keep in touch as we will load up photos, slideshows and other resources as soon as we can.

As always let me know what you think in comments here or via twitter.

We have been hearing that Facebook is due to hit 500m users this month.

As a student of human behaviour this seems to be one time when the passenger get to be the driver in pretty much any way they choose.

Unlike in many areas Facebook is ideal for 500 m niches of 1 and that works pretty well for everyone. Expression is a very powerful thing.

You may have seen an earlier version of this video.

I watched the Digital Nation documentary on the multi tasking clicking on everything that moves lifestyle that many of use are heading towards. Is this wholesale immersion helping us or hindering us while making us feel like we are doing better than we really are.

Perhaps the illusion of instant activity is not just amplified by the web but actually it is distorting our perspective. (Cue Rat in Cage song here. ) See how easy it is to be distracted even by the good things we love.

View Digital Nation Chapter 1 Distracted by Everything here.

It seems that at least some of the really frenetic texting, facebooking, sm twitching is very much an illusion when it comes to focus. Here are the other chapter headings below.

• Chapter 2 What’s It Doing to Their Brains?
  Tests given Stanford multitaskers yield troubling discoveries. Other research into Net use and the brain raises more questions.
• Chapter 3 South Korea’s Gaming CrazeSome cautionary lessons from a country where Internet addiction has become a public health crisis.
• Chapter 4 Teaching with TechnologyTeachers are embracing digital media–’it keeps students engaged; new skills are needed for a new age.’ But is there a catch?
• Chapter 5 The Dumbest Generation?The debate has just begun on whether we are losing as much as we’re gaining in a 24/7 wired world.
• Chapter 6 RelationshipsMillions of people are inhabiting the Net as if it were a real place, satisfying the urge to connect to others in online games, virtual worlds.
• Chapter 7 Virtual WorldsSecond Life offers a totally new reality for humans, says its creator — and IBM has begun shifting its meetings into this virtual space.
• Chapter 8 Can Virtual Experiences Change Us?The U.S. military is using virtual spaces for PTSD therapy and for flying drones in Iraq while based in a room in Nevada.
• Chapter 9 Where Are We Headed?A school is organized around learning through video games–maybe its students are getting something we aren’t yet able to measure or recognize.

—- Very Much worth a look —-Watch it online

Anyone who has been around for more than a decade will have seen incredible change come – and go.

“Action is no substitute for direction.” Me

I actually wrote that more than 20 years ago in a list of recommended reading books that I used to try and compile every year or so.

Outcomes are what really counts most of the time. And yes there are many distractions along the way. For my 2 cents – I reckon switching down a gear and going to the film festival or for some really long swims works better for me.

At least that is the plan.

For years we ‘ve had endless conversations about online traffic. Now its all here and on tap I believe it is time to be more selective. Sure not every movement means anything in the way that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar but lets see some outcomes other than burnout and various over use symptoms.

Traffic is NOT the same as engagement. A like on facebook is not the same as a comment on a blog but the ability to click on the like button does give some clues. #justsaying (like they do on Twitter:)

So is a Facebook fan worth anything ?

I’m sure that there are some formulas.  All fans are different and their FB activity may give some clues as to what their influence or “clout” might be.

If only life was that easy to quantify.

Mashable had some ideas on what FB, LinkedIn and Twitter might be worth. A simple division of total by numbers of actual users might give some ideas.

Of course Linkedin may well be close to reaching full potential and actual earnings. For FB and Twitter they have yet to really monetize much more than a fraction of what they might be capable of.

In a few weeks I’m off to my 4th WordCamp. WordCamps are community organised and local events for bloggers and othere users of WordPress.

What I really, really like about the WordCamp crew is that everyone has a story and often they are are extrememely proactive about projects and outcomes.

WordCampNZ is on Aug 7th & 8th at Unitec in Mt Albert Auckland. Feel free to come along and join in. Go on change the world with us.

Here are just 16 of the speakers ( * a few more to be annouced)   who will be sharing their insights with us.

• Bill Bennett – Writing Online
• Sacha Dylan – Who Are Your Audience
• Alex Shiels – Automattic
• Jeff Ghazally – extending WP e-Commerce through Plugins
• Dan Milward – WP e-Commerce
• Robert Popovic – BuddyPress
• Quintin Russ – WordPress Security
• Grey Lynn 2030 – Community Management Suzanne Kendrick & Pippa Coom
• Courtney Lambert – Marcomms
• Online Video – Wine Vault Way Jayson Bryant
• HTML5 & CSS with Darren Wood
• Advanced Webhosting with Liz Quilty
• Jo Couchman Creative Web Ideas
• SEO 101 for WordPress Michael Brandon – Searchmasters
• Mogul Time Matt Miller
• Blog Design – Rachel Cunliffe

One of the key value points that WordPress offers to its users is a seemingly inexhaustible function library of mini – applications or programming shortcuts.  There is now such a huge supply of plugin extensions that making sense of which WordPress plugins to use can be a challenge for new and even experienced users.

These plugins allow you to extend the core system in any direction without needing to be a coder or rocket scientist. This puts WordPress firmly into the hands of business managers rather than leaving it with the tech staff.

A huge part of the appeal of WordPress for me is the ability to be able to prototype various sections and leverage scripts that have already been road tested by the community.

Imagine you want a slideshow for photos (NextGEN Gallery 1,865,952 times), an events manager, an ecommerce system (WP e-Commerce) or a snip of code that automatically shows related content  (Yet Another Related Posts PluginDownloaded 465,626 times)  just to highlight some of the popular and well known ones.

Chances are all of those functional needs and questions have been considered  before.  In fact for some of the more popular tasks it may be as simple as using the add new plugin button inside the dashboard and searching then auto installing something that looks to be in the right user function zone. However many plugin developers don’t appear to do even the most simple of searches before they re-vinvent the wheel by doing yet another slightly different plugin.

So far so good but at last count on the main plugin repository there were 9,096 PLUGINS, 84,520,662 DOWNLOADS, AND COUNTING. This makes the search and selection process somewhat more complicated.

Having a vast list of plugins is a good quick way of testing out concepts and approaches. what it won’t say there on the counter page is that the vast percentage of plugins were developed to “scratch an itch” by technical problem solvers.

This means that maybe as many as 80% of the plugins have somewhat limited value to most users. And depending on the scale of your site they may very well be ideal for what you need but if you have a larger site your developers might want to look more closely at custom building functions into your theme or custom plugins – whichever is most optimal for fast performance and security.

There is an intriguing discussion over on Alex Kings blog about whether WordPress is a platform or a product As Alex says

“Another challenge with WordPress as a product engagements is managing expectations in regards to 3rd-party plugins and themes. In most cases we will try to budget time to code-review any plugin we include in one of our builds to make sure it is secure and will scale to client’s needs. This can result in us advising the client not to use the plugin or theme they had intended, or require additional time and cost investment in addressing shortcomings of the plugin or theme. There is also the issue of fixing functional bugs in these plugins.

People who view WordPress as a product will typically expect that any collection of plugins will work elegantly and seemlessly together. Rarely is this the case. Even between experienced WordPress developers you will find preferences for different implementation approaches. Mix in plugins written by developers that do not have extensive WordPress experience and you can end up trying to weld the transmission from a 57 Chevy to a tricycle.”

It is not always obvious when there are problems with a particular plugin. Many will work but may clash with certain other plugins or even theme functions and this weakness might need lots of extra testing if the site is going to be a large one.

If it is a small site, you may be able to just switch out to an alternative plugin and most of the time that will work.

Here are some of the more popular plugins. It is a fairly random set of 10 but based on the hundreds of sites that I’ve seen and worked on my guess is that most sites would have at least half of these and combinations of the next 200 or so listed plugins.

• Google XML Sitemaps Downloaded 3,659,339 times
• WPtouch iPhone Theme Downloaded 796,224 times
• All in One SEO Pack Downloaded 4,991,211 times
• Fast and Secure Contact Form Downloaded 269,918 times
• Contact Form 7 Downloaded 1,851,559 times
• NextGEN Gallery Downloaded 1,865,952 times
• WP Super Cache Downloaded 1,197,587
• Google Analyticator Downloaded 854,535
• Twitter Tools Downloaded 532,607
• Sociable Downloads 993,790

You might say that the top 10% of plugins follow a power law distribution, the true number I would guess is much lower / maybe 3% of the total 9,000 or so. The other 97% of plugins have a very long tail distribution.

Your search choices are as follows. The other variables are voter approval (highest rated) by version and general age of the plugin including how many times (Recently Updated) the plugin has been updated. Raw downloads are indicative but if the plugin is updated 6 times per year you may want to divide that number by 6 to get a better idea of relative popularity.

Sort by Relevance, Highest Rated , Newest , Recently Updated, Most Popular

Unfortunately the search filter process is not as good as just using a Google site search. For example looking for SEO plugins as below.

site:http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ SEO

If you search around you can find various top plugin lists that might also be a useful guide.

Finally some of the differences between plugins simply come down to the programmers preferences and arguments about quality of programming code are eternal. They remind me of the Paul Grahams Blub analogy

“Blub is a hypothetical programming language; it is an average programming language “[r]ight in the middle of the abstractness continuum. It is not the most powerful language, but it is more powerful than Cobol or machine language.”. It was used by Graham to illustrate a comparison of power between programming languages that goes beyond Turing completeness, and more specifically, to illustrate the difficulty of comparing a programming language one knows to one that one does not^[14]:”

Sometimes all the programmers are wrong or all right but ask an engineer and the better measurement might be optimal speed of loading or security considerations.

So what is the best way of making sense of WordPress plugins?  I would say the worst person to ask about this is a programmer.

In the past I have run plugin workshops for individual clients to review what they have in context and compared to what other similar sites might be doing.

However if you are a programmer I’d have a good long look at the Blair Williams presentation called : Pimp Your WordPress Plugin or if you’d rather check the video for Pimp Your Plugin over at WordCampTV. Also worth checking out is another recent video by Jonathan Dingman: Essential WordPress Plugins & Optimization should be standard issue for new installs and methods for squeezing the best performance out of your new WordPress blog.

Help in picking plugins is very much on the way. Later this year instead of a version update for WordPress itself the community is being encouraged to work together on a number of the top plugins. These will be identified as core plugins.

One of the best ways of improving code quality is to engage multiple programmers who can argue about what is best and hopefully peer review some of this the same way that WordPress code is reviewed. This is an excellent move in my opinion and I look forward to seeing how it goes later this year.