Early Saturday morning, I bussed it over to WordCamp, one of a series of events held all of the world for WordPress enthusiasts.

Here’s my video recap of the event – from the serious announcements to the inane observations. I took very detailed notes…so much so that I’m pretty sure people will be scared to sit next to me at future conferences. The things I do for you!

WordCamp 2009: On Crushes and Mergers from aziari on Vimeo.

Don’t know what WordPress is? Well, this site is run on it. So are millions of other blogs, and a good number of its users also use it as a CMS (content management system) for their sites. It has a handful of competitors, but WordPress is known for being very intuitive; at the event, creator Matt Mullenweg said his goal for WordPress was to make it “invisible” to users.

I was a virgin WordCamp attendee, but had a great time and it got me thinking about some changes I would like to make on this blog. I also listened to a handful of speakers including:

• Tim Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week. Tim discussed the reasoning behind specific decisions he’s made in his blog design and content. One good tip Tim had was to study the “heat map” for your blog to see where people are clicking. For instance, he personally found that by changing a description from “categories” to “topics,” he received a substantial increase in click-throughs to the newly minted “topics” section of his blog.
• Matt Cutts of Google, who discussed building your blog for SEO. I was surprised to learn that dashes in URLs, not underscores, fare better when you’re optimizing your content for search.
• Matt Mullenweg (see above). Matt’s the same age as me, and I was really impressed by his composure, humulity and speaking abilities. He talked for nearly two hours during the conference – a “State of the Word” speech and a lengthy Q&A – and didn’t miss a beat.

I think my big takeaway was that I need to think more strategically about the features I integrate into my site. I also came away feeling really confident in my decision to change the topic of this blog to something I feel really passionate about. I’ve found my voice here.

Were you there? What were your big takeaways?