Yesterday was Wordcamp Melbourne 2007. I arrived a few hours late, overslept a long story, but what I did see was great. Some of the highlights for me:-

Darren Rowse: Good insight into the different types of ads and how the perform on different types of blogs. I need to think through some of these things and will probably make a few changes.

Christine Davis: Tags vs Categories finally I now understand! Someone from the audience provided a great analogy categories are like chapters in a book, where as tags are the index at the back of the book. Now I need to add tags into this blog.

Alister Cameron: CSS rocks! Alister showed us how you can make major changes to your blog without hacking in PHP (which is what I do) all by using CS. He specifically spoke about a theme called SandBox, I will be looking at this carefully in the coming weeks. To use the theme I had to upgrade my blog, and I have begun playing with Widgets on my sidebar.

Roundtables: I sat in on 2 different roundtables, the first was open topic so we discussed tags, mobile web, broadband, mesh networks, OLPC. Really good discussion and very hard to summarise other than the world is changing! The second was on blogging as the new media ok topic but nothing really to latch onto to discussion.

Panel: Alister, James, Christine and Alex Sheils sat down for a panel discussion at the end. Slow to get going, aren’t they always, but gathered momentum as things progressed. Topics included will wordpress.com be sold, no according to Alex but yes they have been approached, and does RSS need to be expanded.

There are photos up on Flickr of the day.

Once again thanks to James Farmer for organising and Simon Chen of Eight Black for the sponsorship.