william couch

g33ks unite.

That’s pretty much what happened over the past week here in Orlando. On Sunday the 23rd, code-crunchers, web developers, hackers and designers came together to put on the first biannual BarCamp Orlando. Later in the week, on Friday the 28th, social-media-gurus, PR analysts, business consultants, Twitterers, WordPress fiends, videobloggers and everyone in between came together for the second annual blogOrlando. Together, the two comprised the busiest and best week I’ve had down here, yet.

BarCamp is an unconference where the talks are determined the day of, and the event is held at a local venue, as opposed to a large, structured facility. There are several contingents around the globe, and this was Orlando’s first. The man behind the event, Florida-local Gregg Pollack, explains the idea in a great instructional video shot and edited by another local, Jason Hawkins, who, by the way, is an awesome, fellow film fanatic. Jason and Gregg are also the team behind the famous Rails Envy Ads. The geek factor was very high, the event was very well done, and it was a great to meet the local tech talent. I was pretty excited to meet Alex Rudloff, cofounder of Emurse.com, creator of Twitterholic, and a software engineer of AOL.com. I also sat next to Mark Jaquith, one of the lead developers of WordPress, the blogging platform this site’s run on. I’m telling you, Orlando has a lot more going for it than I think many give it credit.

UPDATE: Watch the awesomeness that is the BarCamp Orlando video put together by the illustrious Jason Hawkins:

blogOrlando, on the other hand was a semi-unconference (how else would you get national participants if the scheduled sessions were unknown?) spearheaded by Josh Hallett, of hyku. The event was geared to strike up discussions about social media, journalism, personal and professional online identities, blogging practices, videoblogging, podcasting, marketing, design, web standards and search engine optimization and, boy, did it. The event was attended by some very smart people (the keynote speaker was Shel Israel, coauthor to Robert Scoble, of Naked Conversations) and subsequently initiated some very intriguing conversations about all of the aforementioned topics related to social media.

One particular session on managing your personal and professional identity both online and offline, led by Alicia Dorset, strived, due to a small group of participants passionate about the topic. Aside from many great points touched on, one that was of particular interest was made by Laurie Mayers, of Manning, Selvage & Lee, a PR firm out of Detroit (Michigan represent!). She stated she wouldn’t hire someone if she couldn’t find them on Google, because she’s looking for people who are both active and adept at working online (she’s also published a recap of the session her firm’s blog). It has often been stated that you should be careful what you do and post online (and to an extent you should), but looking at it from that standpoint was particularly interesting to me. I’ll dig deeper into this concept in a later entry.

Both events were fantastic and I’m excited to see the subsequent iterations of these events in the next year. Cheers to all those involved in putting together these events - they were both, by far, huge successes and I feel fortunate to be around such talent.