Automattic Lounge

WordCamp San Francisco was a total hoot! I met up with a bunch of old friends, made a few new ones, had some good food, drank a few brews, hung out with a whole lot of cool people and all the while, I was surrounded by WordPress goodness.

Thank you to all the organizers, volunteers and participants!

A few bits of interesting statistics and news from WordCamp San Francisco “State of the Word”:

• WordPress.org downloads were nearly twice as many as last year
• There are twice as many WordPress.org blogs on the web this as compared to last year
• Akismet caught just as many spam comments this year as last (count grew very little)
• There is a Blackberry version of the WordPress management app coming soon, iPhone version will see an upgrade
• There will be a GPL paid themes page on the WordPress Extend to encourage the business model
• At some point in the future, the WordPress and WPMU codebase will be merged
• WordPress 2.8 is very close to being released
• WordPress 2.9 will focus on stuff under the hood

I listened to a bunch of the presentations this year (for a change) and I found them all very interesting. Chris Pirillo is a blast on stage and his talk on building communities was insightful and slightly disturbing at the same time. You should see him emulate Venn Diagrams on stage with his hands going around in circles! John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, was fantastic. His slides are on slideshare but if you are into building communities and believe in Open Source philosophies and care even slightly about Mozilla, you should wait for the video and watch it.

The WordCamp Report has live blogs of all the speakers and the videos will soon be on WordPress.tv. My WordCamp San Francisco pictures are on Flickr and I took a bunch of others while I was walking around to the various meetups. I am planning on attending WordCamp Chicago next week.