Radio Active Radio Ad

Posted on January 28, 2011 by Dan

Our friends over at Radio Active in Wellington have put together a really amazing Radio Ad for us.

Radio Active is a Wellington based Radio Station that has been playing local music and supporting the New Zealand music industry since the start of time, well at least since as long as time has mattered!!

To all the crew at Radio Active 89 fm – we Salute you!!!

Please support our Radio Sponsor by heading over to their website; a place where you can listen to some tunes, read up on some local gossip, a place where you can even consider getting yourself a Radio Active Card today. (watch out for exclusive Radio Active Card holder competitions at WordCamp, all I’m saying at the moment is 2degrees)

» Listen to the WordCamp Radio Ad (html5 browsers are best) «

Posted in Sponsors for WordCampNZ | Tagged | 2 Comments

Showcase “Futures of” Panel

Posted on January 26, 2011 by Jason

Lance WiggsRichard MacManus - RWWMany WordCampNZ attendees are thought leaders in their own respective fields. We thought it would be great to talk around trends, changes and impacts of WordPress and blogging going forward.

This year we have a super panel discussion planned with Lance Wiggs and Richard MacManus as special guests. Julie Starr and John Ford will also be on the panel.

Richard is well known as founder of Read Write Web where he is widely recognized as a leader in articulating what’s next in technology and what it means for society at large.

Lance is best known in NZ for his role as Head of Group Digital at Fairfax Media NZ in 2007 New Zealand’s largest media company and before that as sole adviser to CEO Sam Morgan and Board Chair Richard Abbott on Trade Me’s sale to Fairfax Media for NZ $750m.

WordPress itself has in many ways been a game changer, firstly with bloggers and now as a content platform and framework. We know that like Lance and Richard many of you are game changers working at the edges of media and redefining your specialist areas.

  • Where does blogging, community engagement and media all meet?
  • What are the smart trends in this space?
  • How does mobile and gaming fit in with blogging and social media?
  • How is your life and business being impacted by new ways of communicating with friends, strangers, customers, partners and suppliers?
  • What are your questions?

We invite you to write in some questions for the panel in the comment stream below.

Does blogging have a future ?

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Scaling WordPress for Hi-Traffic

Posted on January 25, 2011 by Jason

Ryan AllenRyan Allen of Envato is visiting from Melbourne. He is reponsible for managing (server) performance at some of Australia’s busiest websites.

Managing traffic spikes is crucial as projects get bigger and Ryan will will speaking about what to do when that happens to your WordPress site.

If your website gets hit by massive trafic flows what are your best options?

In October 2010 the

“Envato marketplace network (ActiveDen, ThemeForest, CodeCanyon, AudioJungle, 3dOcean, VideoHive, GraphicRiver and the Tuts+ Marketplace) reached a considerable milestone of a combined membership of 500,000 members around the world, more than double its membership of just one year ago.”

from PR Web so Envato knows a fair bit about managing high volume traffic across its range of websites. Envato is also a WordCampNZ sponsor so be sure to check out some of their websites and market places.

Posted in Speakers | Tagged | 3 Comments

WordcampNZ on WammoLive

Posted on January 24, 2011 by Jason

Glenn Williams runs a great live show in the mornings on KiwiFM where invited guests get to talk about projects and what they’re up to. RadioWammo

We got to talk about WordCampNZ with Glenn so along I went. It’s all one take and no script plus Glenn live mixes website shots and streams the show on ustream.

There is a tiny video camera somewhere near the microphone but Glenn is over to the left and so the challenge is to talk directly to him and try not to think about the camera.

P.S. Jayson Bryant of  WineVaultTV and Vaughn Davis are regular guests and have both been to WordCampNZ where Jayson presented last time.

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Julie Starr – Evolving the News

Posted on January 21, 2011 by Jason

Julie Starr - Evolving New RoomWordCampNZ welcomes Julie Starr as a speaker and contributor. If anyone knows about the huge changes in the way that media is produced and consumed it is Julie.

The Evolving Newroom is her blog – “a place to think out loud about how the internet is changing the news business and journalism.”  Bravo – we like that.

A journalist by trade, she has worked in the media for 20+ years in NZ and the UK.

In that time she’s been a reporter, sub-editor, page layout sub, chief sub-editor, radio presenter, workflow specialist, change agent and editorial manager.

She was part of the team who designed and launched the Daily Telegraph‘s integrated web-and-print newsroom in the UK, having a particular focus on future workflows.  She continues to consult on newsroom design and workflow projects.

Now based in New Zealand, Julie runs allaboutthestory.com, a place to buy and sell news features, reviews, cartoons, caricatures and other stories of interest to newspaper, magazine and web publishers.

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BuddyPress Comes of Age

Posted on January 21, 2011 by Jason

Paul GinnsPaul Gibbs is a core BuddyPress Developer from UK and has recently been contributing to a number of NZ projects. His website is : http://byotos.com/

Paul will be speaking at WordcampNZ about BuddyPress related topics and about the Achievements Plugin that he has developed.

Paul has previously presented at WordCamp Ireland and WordCamp UK . He was also at  WordCamp New York in Oct 2010.

Inspired by video game achievement systems, Paul has developed Achievements for BuddyPress gives your community fresh impetus by promoting and rewarding social interaction with challenges, badges and points.

For example, you may reward users for commenting on a blog post or uploading a picture to their profile. There are different ways of awarding and rewarding positive contributions to each community.

Achievements has its own website

Posted in Speakers | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

KiwiBlog is the Comment King

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Jason

David Farrar - KiwiBlogDavid Farrar has probably the busiest WordPress blog in New Zealand. What makes it all work is lots of comments – up to 500 per day…

David will be speaking about running a busy blog and what is involved making that all work.

“I blog on any issue or thing I find interesting. Now this is mostly politics, but also quite a bit on technology and the Internet. And as my friends use the blog to keep track of what I am up to, there’s a fair amount of personal stuff also, photos of places I have been, food or movie reviews, or just anything I want to share.

Kiwiblog gets around half a million pageviews per month. I normally blog six to eight items a day, and we often get 500+ comments a day. There are around 6,500 registered commenters.”

David is a widely respected media commentator and also runs market research company curia.  All of that is covered in his disclosure statement.

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SEO for WordPress – Michael Brandon

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Jason

Michael-Brandon-SearchMastersWe are very pleased & delighted to bring back Michael Brandon of Searchmasters as  a speaker.

Michael presented some very practical insights last August at WordCampNZ. He works with many WordPress sites and is winner of NZ SEO competition.

“More than 50 search engine specialists battled it out over the past three months to attempt to seize the top position on google.co.nz for the keyword – “quadracentifiable” – a fictitious word invented specifically for the competition.

Top of the list when the competition closed at 5pm on November 28th, was the website run by Michael Brandon of SearchMasters , the winner of the inaugural New Zealand SEO Challenge.”…

“In the end it was, according to the winner, sheer hard-work, determination and time that won the competition. “The competition has been all about linking. Who has access to the most links, and the most powerful links from other websites into their competition website. If you need hundreds of other websites to link to you or to client websites, you need a good strategy, and you need it to be cost efficient. We wrote articles that contained links into our sites, then republished unique versions on many websites. The way we executed this proved to be the difference,” Brandon says.”

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Justin Sainton on Group Deals

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Jason

Justin SaintonJustin Sainton is the founder of Zao Web Design, LLC, a web firm based in Portland, Oregon USA. Justin will be speaking at WordCamp NZ about WordPress & Group Deals.

Working exclusively with WordPress and an array of other open-source technologies, Justin and Zao have provided creative and effective solutions for a wide variety of companies and associations ranging from Targus to Pitney Bowes to the National Education Association to HTC.

When not managing Zao or enjoying his beautiful wife and lovely one-year-old daughter, Justin can be found enjoying the finest coffee Oregon has to offer.

The story of Group Deals Plugin, the latest premium Plugin from Instinct, is a classic example of the power of the WordPress community. While presenting on WordPress E-Commerce at WordCamp Philadelphia, someone in the audience asked if anyone had made a “Groupon” WordPress plugin.

Now, at WordCampNZ, we’re excited to unveil the first stable release of GroupDeals, soon to be known as the Groupon Killer :)

Update: 20th Jan Spreets Online Group Buying was sold to Yahoo for $40m. In the same article Anthill notes that Retail Me was also a very large play in the same space.

Tech Crunch quotes “After SEO and email, affiliate type deals/coupons are the most profitable way to get new customers, says WhaleShark.”

Justin is Js_Zao on twitter.

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John Ford Speaking

Posted on January 14, 2011 by Jason

John FordJohn Ford has been to NZ last year and presented at WordCamp SF 2010. We are delighted to announce he will be speaking at WordCampNZ 2011.

In Wellington he will be giving special attention to security ( & just guessing but probably backups) as well.

John works for Automattic, the company behind WordPress, and he is currently focusing on VaultPress, a realtime backup service for WordPress.org users.

He has been a blogger and a blog builder for the past 7 years, but started programming full-time in 1998, threw in a B.S. in Computer Science and a minor in Mathematics for good measure, and in 2004 went into business for himself until Automattic dialed his number.

Johns website has a more background over here. On twitter John is @iamjohnford – he was previously aldenta.

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