@WordCamp
Posted: August 16, 2008 Filed under: Blogging 4 Comments
Today I am happy to be at [WordCamp](http://2008.wordcamp.org), a conference for WordPress users and devotees. Some may find it curious that I am here, being such an ardent [Movable Type](http://www.movabletype.org/) user, but truth be told this is not about platform bias, this is about *bloggers*, and what better place to find a collection of 400+ bloggers at 8am on a Saturday?
No doubt, people are looking over my shoulder looking at the Movable Type logo wondering the same thing. “What is he doing here?!” I hope they ask.
There is so much to learn from the WordPress community and from how it organizes itself. As the Movable Type community enters another phase of growth and expansion, especially following the release of [Movable Type Pro](http://www.movabletype.com/download/), it is important to look to those who have been successful at growing a tight knit, even fanatical following of users.
OMG Matt is on stage. I am *dying*. *sigh* Gotta run!
## My WordCamp Schedule
* Search and Findability – Aaron Brazell
* DiSo, OAuth and more – Will Norris
* Even Faster Web Sites – Steve Souders
* Andy Skelton
* Secure Coding with WordPress – Mark Jaquith
* WordPress and Microformats – Tantek Celik
* Switching to WordPress Painlessly – Lloyd Budd
* 450 WordPress Power User Tips – Lorelle VanFossen
* Hassle-free Upgrades
* State of the Word – Matt Mullenweg
And then I have to run. Dada-duty calls so that [Mama](http://www.hairyalien.com/) can have a break.
majordojo on wordpress 
I hope that last line, before the jump was sarcastic. Funny.
Hope you enjoyed it. Wish I knew you were there — would have said hi. I was sitting a few seats away from David during the “State of the Word.” He was like a marble statue as Matt was going over the stats. Everyone else was cheering at hearing of 2.6 million self-installs of WordPress and David had on a perfect poker face. I was pretty amused by that. 🙂
I really hope the MT team does take some cues from WordPress in terms of its community. MT seemed to have a really good community back in the 2.x days, but really suffered in the 2004-2007 era. Competition is good, and means the market is healthy, and I think blog platforms stagnate without an involved community of users and third party developers.
I’m actually really excited now that MT is doing bleeding edge features like OAuth and OpenID. Without any real feature competition, it can be difficult to know what is feature-worthy. Still not sold on OAuth and OpenID though… at least until the XML-RPC interoperability issue is fixed.
I was sitting right next to David actually, busily writing down and taking my own notes about the stats he was projecting. One of the more notable was this:
* 2.6M active blogs – wow.
* 1,777,222 of those are relatively up to date and are more or less “secure”
* The rest, around 900,000, are considered flat-out insecure
I’d have to admit that I wish there was more community within Movable Type. I’ve gone over to the support forums a couple of times and it really feels empty over there.