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?

(Update: I disabled my iAd so it wouldn’t interfere with reading/viewing of all posts that came after it. So, if you’re late to the game to reading/watching this post, I’m sorry.)

AdTech 2009 was honestly a disappointment. I work in marketing, and maybe I’m ultra-sensitive to cliche marketing speak and ploys, but you can only take so much messaging about connecting, engaging and delivering and “booth babes” until you start to tune things out.

Still, I did find one company that caught my eye, Innovate Media, which creates a type advertising most of us have come across, but know little about.

Innovate creates virtual spokespeople who literally walk onto a Web site’s homepage to greet you or tell you about the latest promotion. (As you can see, I got the chance to test it out for myself!) I’ve seen virtual spokespeople more and more over the last few years and Innovate is one of many companies doing this. In my perusing of its competitors’ sites, however, I found Innovate to have some of the best production quality.

My thoughts on using virtual spokespeople in marketing are mixed:

• While virtual spokespeople put a moving, talking human behind a Web site, they also can interrupt the browsing experience, especially for frequent site visitors. Although an advertiser can technically choose for a virtual spokesperson to play only on demand, they usually do not.

(Update from Innovate Media: Apparently, advertisers do have the option to set a cookie to prevent non-user initiated video replays on repeat visits.)

• In certain marketing campaigns I think virtual spokespeople can be a great fit. Innovate did a promotion with Mad Men, for example. Don Draper or another man in a finely tailored suit talking directly to me? Heck yes. My dentist popping on the screen and telling me about healthy flossing habits? Not so much.

So those are my thoughts and I’m eager to hear yours. Here’s my actual conversation at the show with John Cecil, Innovate Media’s president:

AdTech 2009: The pixie goes green from aziari on Vimeo.

One thing Tim O’Reilly, who coined the term Web 2.0, has said is that Web 2.0 represented a shakedown and slimming out of all the BS in Web 1.0.

But now, we’re in a shakedown of much grander proportions. What sort of BS must the industry sift through now?

It all begs the question: “Where do we go from here?”

I talked to a number of really smart people at the Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco – from Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/Write/Web to Facebook engineers to the Communications head at Wikimedia – to find out.

Web2.0 Expo 2009: Where do we go from here? from aziari on Vimeo.