Despite the icy roads and frigid temperatures, hundreds of people from the US southeast region came together at SCAD Atlanta on January 8th – 9th to attend the inagural WordCamp Atlanta, a conference where the WordPress (aka WP) community exchange tips and tricks about this widely popular blogging (and sometimes as a web content management) tool.

I had the pleasure to attend this event along with my colleague Kathlene Hestir. Below are the highlights from the various sessions. I’ve tried to link to the presentations on Slideshare whenever possible.

Friday Night, Janurary 8

WordPress & Journalism
Alejandro Leal and Thomas Wheatley (Creative Loafing Atlanta)

• Managing their blog using WordPress MU (which is the multi-user version of WordPress).
• Have a decent amount of data: 58 blogs, 906 users, 7977 Posts, 17556 Comments.
• Digital or online content is mostly separate from print content; very little sharing between the two.

WordPress & SEO (View on Slideshare)
Topher Kohan (CNN.com)

• Use basic SEO, such as good page title, content headline, 250 words, and ALT tags, on your website.
• You should use breadcrumbs b/c taxonomy is good for both search engines and the user).
• Rankings is going to become dependend on page load times (so hire a developer with strong server and page code optimization experience).
• Sculpt your webite with rel=”nofollow” attributes.
• Canonical URL’s are going to play a larger role in the future.

ADDITIONAL NOTES: Topher takes SEO very seriously — he did an amazing job getting everyone fired up about this topic. There are a ton of good plug-ins in the presentation so just check it out.

The AJC and WordPress
Cliff Barnett and Jason Gilstrap (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

• Rolled out WordPress to make this simple and consistent.
• WordPress is the central content repository for newsroom as content from system gets pushed both online and to the print system.
• Blogs responsible for 8% of traffic; posts on average get 700 comments.

Saturday, Janurary 9

KEYNOTE PRESENTATION: WordPress Resolutions: What to expect in 2010
Jane Wells (Automattic)

• Big Announcement: WP 3.0 is a producet of “The Merge” between WordPress and WordPress MU.
• Expect lots of goodies: a multi-site platform, new base theme, custom posts and canonical plug-ins (or de facto plug-ins for Twitter, Google Analytics, etc.).
• Enhanced media functionality is now pushed to WP 3.1 (maybe).
• WordPress.org is going to be undergoing a major redesign (with help from WP Ninja Mark Jaquith)

ADDITIONAL NOTES: Things like multi-site platform, custom “posts” (aka custom content types) and canonical plug-ins is HUGE news — this is where WP finally takes the baby step to become a true PHP-based web content management tool. Alternative solutions such as Drupal should take note!

Advanced Google Analytics Integration with WordPress (View on Google Docs)
Rusty Tanton (WebMD)

• Current plug-ins for Google Analytics are weak — they only feed you the basic info.
• Using custom variable and advanced segmentation one can REALLY analyze what’s happening on your blog

ADDITIONAL NOTES: Rusty code examples in his presentation so I suggest that you check it out.

Complex Content Management with the Pods CMS Framework Plugin
Scott Kingsley

• Ability to create custom content types in WordPress using Pods (Pods Plug-in).
• Data for pods maintained in separate tables.

ADDITIONAL NOTES: An interesting conversation started up between Scoot and Mike Schinkel over the viability of Pods since Jane announced that custom post types were coming (see tweet).

WordPress Security: Protectin your WP from Inside Out (View on Slideshare)
Syed Balkhi (WP Beginner)

• Do the obvious: keep WP updated, rename “wp-admin” folder and use strong passwords (10 chars or more).
• Use advanced techniques like, moving wp-config.php out of webroot, reassign admin rights to another user and delete admin account, get rid of error message on login screen, and limit access via IP whitelist to wp-admin folder and change DB tables prefix (don’t use wp_)
• Tons of good plug-ins for security so don’t be lazy!

PHP and WordPress – Converging Communities
Aaron Brazell

• Core is still written in PHP4 (some parts are using PHP5) so it is time to update core!

Final Thoughts

First of all, the event was a great success — kudos to Tessa and Brandon for pulling it off. I can’t imagine someone walking out of this event thinking that they didn’t learn a ton. And in case you missed it, plan to attend next year’s WordCamp Atlanta Conference, which will be held February 11-12 2011.

Looks like Google broke the seal today on the Google Wave Frame project. Google has released Google Wave Frame for Internet Explorer, which brings the Chrome browser to Explorer 6/7/8. Basically, users can use Wave Frame plugin to run Chrome inside Internet Explorer.

As a marketer (or a developer), you better start thinking about the impact that this will have on your analytics. It is actually one of the easiest  way to identify and segment your early technology adopters from your standard visitors.  To identify these users, you can leverage the user agent string. Visitors with Google Wave Frame will generate the standard user agent string for Internet Explorer except that you’ll see an the addition of the word chromeframe.

Now granted, adoption for Google Wave Frame is not going to skyrocket overnight so don’t expect a flood of Wave Frame visitors. Considering the impact of Google Chrome (last time I checked with some of our clients at Engauge, Chrome adoption is barely scratching the surface), it will take a while before it will crack the top 6 browser used on your website ceiling. Nonetheless, start paying attention to your analytics report because web analytics tools will likely get this one wrong for the next few weeks.

Last week, Adobe announced that it intended to acquire Omniture for $1.8 Billion. While many analysts were confused about the benefit of such an acquisition, I explained in a blog post how the Omniture acquisition can improve Adobe’s revenue and provide marketers with simple tracking of online advertising initiatives. In my closing remarks, I explained that Marketers were already accustomed to tracking user behavior on their website and that they were eager to extend that functionality to Flash. It seemed to me that Adobe was planning to leverage Omniture to satisfy this need.

And this morning I found out my thought on user behavior measurement in Flash is one step closer to becoming a reality: Adobe just announced the availability of a Flash distribution service via a partnership with Gigya. As part of this agreement, Flash developers now can easily embed social networking sharing capabilities and user tracking into Flash applications, thus widening audience reach.

As part of the announcement, Adobe has unveiled a platform called Distribution Manager that allows developers to tag their application and track users. With Distribution Manager, Flash developers can review reports on user engagement by campaigns, a feature that is already found in Omniture. While Adobe has not specified that Omniture is used behind the scenes to power this solution, there’s nothing that’s stopping Adobe from leveraging Omniture’s platform in delivering these capabilities. At the very least, Omniture can leverage the insights from Adobe’s platform to fine tune their social media offering, which may include reporting on social behaviors such as emails sent from the application, stickiness or viral grabs.

This strategy clearly sets up Adobe and Omniture to become more relevant in the market place.