Check twitter updates from a bunch of attendees here.

Wiki with attendees and details of talks here.

My photos of the event available here.

I’ve other notes on people I spoke to and talks attended, to add to this post when I pretty them up properly.

Things I learned from tonight’s talk include..

1. A great thing to do to get your site ranking is to join popular social media sites like technorati.com (me), digg.com, reddit.com (me), sphinn.com, mixx.com, amazon.com (me), youtube.com (me), stumbleupon.com (me), myspace.com (me, me drumming), propeller.com, create profiles, submit articles, post reviews, comment, link to your site, etc.
2. Track your website traffic to see how the changes you’re making are working using tools like google analytics, awstats, etc.
3. Read and stick to the google webmaster guidelines.
4. Google for, and read read read all the great online sites that gives lots of SEO information away for free, like SEObook.com.
5. Google lists search terms that are hot right now over at Google trends. Find any you can tie to your core business, come up with an informative article on one of these hot topics, and you’ll scream to the top of the google search results listings for those terms.
6. Use WordPress, and use it with plugins that allow easy submission to social media sites, like the Share This plugin. Even Matt Cutts of Google recommends using WordPress as your blogging software as it’s well optimized for Google SEO right out of the box.

These are some key points I came away with. I’ll add more as/if I remember them.

All in all a great learning and networking event, really worth attending. Even though I got a $35 parking ticket, a $25 ticket for no front license plate, and paid $25 for the event after Dr. Mike supplied a code to get me free access to the event. D’oh!

Went for the upgrade on Friday night ..
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Conferences are typically hosted by big business, commercial organizations, etc. but this is different in that it’s the actual participants are responsible for setting the agenda, giving the talks, participating fully and actively in the event. If they don’t, there will be no event!

I heard a story on NPR just today where they were talking about events just like this, and they’ve coined a term to describe them.. “un-conference”.

There’s one happening tomorrow called BarCamp.

More info at the BarCamp wiki, wikipedia, BarCamp Los Angeles meet March 2008,

I had backups of all the data, but hadn’t realized I’d not backed up essential config like /etc and /var.

I thought I had an ad hoc backup of the whole OS, but that turned out not to be. A quick fsck and it became completely hosed.

Once I could work out how to do it, it was pretty straightforward to restore the wordpress sites, kudos to the wordpress folks!

My photo album using Gallery2 on the other hand was a complete PITA. I like using it for my photo album but it’s waaaaaaaaaaaaay too complicated. I know I had my album of photos preserved, the installation directory for my config, and the mysql database backed up. They simply won’t restore. I strongly suspect a problem with a URL rewriting plugin that’s totally misbehaving, but I can’t see how to fix it right now as I’ve been doing this so long my eyes are going crooked.

I need to sleep.

When I get back, I need to get 3 750GB drives, RAID 2 of them, and have the 3 for an independent backup. That combined with the offsite backup at Steve’s should mean I’m covered. Hopefully!

Headed to Ireland on Weds, need to pack, get presents, tidy up loose ends, last thing I needed was this kind of failure!

•  Japanese journalized shot at point blank range, unprovoked. [video]
• School guards break teenagers arm for leaving crumbs. [story, video]

I’ll add to this as I find more examples.

Calvin College - News - Calvin Students Research Kent County Congregations

“So far as we can tell, this is the first supercomputer to have this low price/performance ratio—the first to cost less than $100/Gflop,” said Adams.This is a significant achievement considering that Microwulf is more than twice as fast as Deep Blue, the IBM-created supercomputer that beat world chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, and cost only a fraction of the $5 million spent to build Deep Blue.

Microwulf has been measured to process 26.25 gigaflops, or 26.25 billion double-precision floating point instructions, per second. It achieves this performance by relying on four dual-core motherboards connected by an 8-port Gigabyt Ethernet switch. The connected components form a three-tiered system that looks like a triple-decker sandwich.

That was a bit freaky, reading about traffic tickets and the like here, I clicked through the “Privacy Information” link to here.

“Although we may use your Amazon.com cookie to determine whether you are a recognized Amazon visitor and to offer personalized content (such as product recommendations) and special offers, we do not keep or attempt to construct a record of the Web sites you visit.”

I know cookies are used for tracking, but it was a bit surreal to see the exact stuff I’d been browsing in Amazon the other day turn up in a seemingly random page.

From this article.

This is brilliant:

http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/

I love the way they waited long enough for organizations and individuals to do enough to incriminate themselves before publishing this.

Lots of examples of interesting suspect edits listed here: wikidgame