I went to a conference last weekend called Word Camp put on by the folks who brought us WordPress, the blog tool and weblog platform. A highlight for me was meeting John. C. Dvorak, and hearing him debate with Om Malik about whether bloggers should be recognized as legitimate reporters. I’ve been reading John’s columns for years.

Here’s a picture of me with John C. Dvorak:

Darin and John C. Dvorak

I also met a few members of the WordPress team, including Matthew Mullenweg (WordPress founder - go Matt!), Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress, and a British guy whose name I don’t remember at the moment.

Other notables I met include Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts. I was surprised he wasn’t scheduled to speak, and when I asked him about it he replied the WordPress people didn’t know we was planning to attend. We chatted about Wisconsin (his current state of residence), Chicago, and New Zealand, where he has lived for the past several years until his move to Wisconsin.

Here’s a picture of me with Stephan Spencer (thank you Webmacster87):

Darin and Stephan Spencer

One of my favorite talks of the day was by Matt Cutts of Google. He was entertaining and gave us some great insights on how to optimize our sites for Google.

I also met Jeremy Wright, the CEO of b5Media and fellow Canadian (he lives in Toronto).

Here’s a random crowd shot with me in it at the far left (thank you Webmacster87):

Darin in the crowd