Hundreds of computer geeks, designers, techies, bloggers, WordPress users and developers converged upon San Francisco for the 4th annual WordCamp last weekend. Since the first conference four years ago, back when WordPress was on version 2.0, the number of people using the software has exploded. The event was organized under the direction of WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, and featured a number of engaging speakers, presentations and innovations. In keeping with their open source philosophy, much of the conference was also streamed live on the web, allowing free access for the masses.
The Democratization of the Web
This year’s WordCamp was a huge success, bringing together disparate people with a variety of interests, and offering many new insights into cutting edge infrastructure developments for online technologies and blogs. San Francisco based web designer and artist Eliza Barrios attended the event, and commented on the positive atmosphere:
“It was a very diverse crowd, not just a bunch of young white guys. I met an older woman in her late 60’s who had just started blogging. Matt (Mullenweg) kept comparing the open source development process of WordPress to jazz, where everyone collaborates, plays a part, and some people have solos – which would be equivalent to plug-ins. The quote that I kept hearing was…code is word, but if you don’t know it, there’s a huge community willing to help. I totally respect the constant working and re-working of the one thing that was created a few years ago. Matt was totally down to earth and had some really good things to say. The new version 3.0 is going to be super sweet. It seemed like WordPress exists as an analogy to “democratizing” the web…a real live community for the “socialism” of words – example: http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/2010/04/22/guide-mirroring-a-censored-wordpress-blog/ – created by the WordPress community to get voices heard where voices are not allowed to…amazing and all for FREE!.”
Photographs by Eliza Barrios
XP o/s won’t even run the graphics screen of “Quick Basic”, and there are dozens of sights catering for bloggers. The words “Open source” attract a different type of fish ? If only one of them could tell me what exactly I’m missing by saving myself further futile effort in this “geeks parasise” ! It seems that words have lost their meaning. Just what is “computing” these days ? A ne way of signing-in to blogville and blogging to other bloggers ? An infinite menu of everything you could possibly ever want with a trillion gigabyte topping ? – and some woffle called “souce code” for the dig ?