Are you interested in making money from your blog?

Jeremy Wright is the CEO of b5media, a WordPress-based blog network that has experimented with dozens of types of monetization and ads and will be sharing his experience with the WordCamp community of what works and what doesn’t.

Session Leader: Jeremy Wright

WordPress blog: Ensight

Jeremy Wright is a longtime serial entrepenur who has been involved with the business, programming, and IT aspects of the technology industry for nearly a decade. He has focused on communication-orientated ventures and reguarally consults on blogging, communication, IT, and time management. Jeremy is the author of Blog Marketing, a business book on blogging as well as as the President of b5media, a prominent blog network. Jeremy lives in New Brunswick, Canada with his two children, Evan and Alex, and his wife, Shannon.

Lorelle VanFossen is one of the most prominent writers in the WordPress community with a knack for breaking complex topics down in a way anyone can understand.

She also knows a thing or two about building traffic and connection with audience, having built her own blog to well over a million and a half pageviews. Lorelle will be talking about strategies for connecting to your audience, writing, and of course kicking ass.

Session Leader: Lorelle VanFossen

WordPress blog: Lorelle on WordPress

There are many sides to Lorelle VanFossen. One is a public speaker, instructor, writer, and consultant on web writing, web design, and blogging, especially working with WordPress. Another is as a transient traveling the world as part of the duo team of VanFossen Productions, professional nature photographers and writers presenting workshops and programs on travel, writing, and nature photography. You can frequently find Lorelle and her husband, Brent, and their writing and photography in many national and international magazines, newspapers, ezines, and blogs such as Blog Herald, Outdoor and Nature Photography, Shutterbug, Photo Techniques, The Mountaineer, Jerusalem Post, Phenomenal Women of the Web, and Weblog Tools Collection.

My good friend Douglas Bell will be recording his podcast PreviewCast, at Word Camp! If you are at Word Camp, come upstairs and enjoy the show!

Last year Om Malik lead a discussion on what bloggers could learn from journalism, and vice versa. This year he teams up with noted contrarian John C. Dvorak to take the discussion to the next level.

Session Leader: John C. Dvorak

WordPress blog: Dvorak Uncensored

Current PC Magazine Columnist writing Inside Track, an essay and a weekly online column. These articles are licensed around the world. Also a weekly columnist for Dow-Jones Marketwatch, Info! (Brazil) and BUG Magazine (Croatia). Previously a columnist for Forbes, Forbes Digital, PC World, MacUser, PC/Computing, Barrons, Smart Business and other magazines and newspapers. Former editor and consulting editor for Infoworld. Has appeared in the New York Times, LA Times, SF Examiner, Vancouver Sun. Was on the start-up team for CNet TV as well as ZDTV. At ZDTV (and TechTV) was host of Silicon Spin for four years doing 1000 live and live-to-tape TV shows. Also was on public radio for 8 years. Written over 4000 articles and columns as well as authoring or co-authoring 14 books.

2004 Award winner of the American Business Editors Association’s national gold award for best online column of 2003. That was followed up by an unprecedented second national gold award from the ABEA in 2005, again for the best online column (for 2004).

Session Leader: Om Malik

WordPress blog: GigaOM, and many more.

Om Malik, is the founder of GigaOmniMedia, Inc. and executive editor for GigaOM.com. Before launching his own publishing venture, Om was a senior writer for Business 2.0 magazine covering telecom and broadband stories. For more info on Om, see the Om Malik extended bio.

John Dvorak and Om Malik are on stage in a debate! “Blogs vs. Journalism!”

Meta tags? Title? Sponsored links? What the heck?

There are few people in the world that know more about how Google works than Matt Cutts, and he’s here to help us separate the wheat from the chaff in the wild and wooly world of search engines.

Session Leader: Matt Cutts

WordPress blog: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

Bio coming soon. On other topic, if you are searching for a nursing program, checkout Nursing Degrees in North GA for more details.

This weekend is the 2007 WordCamp conference at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco, CA.

I will be doing blogging while down there, although I may do like summaries of the day. I will have my camera with me, so depending on my ability to find time, you might be interested in checking out my Flickr photos during the day. I might update them during the day, if not, I’ll definitely try to get them updated in the evening/night. However, as there is free wifi being provided, you can be guaranteed that I’ll be keeping my Twitter up-to-date with everything that’s going on. And of course, there’s plenty of places to find WordCamp coverage this year.
So here’s to what will be sure to be a great weekend! Also, remember that I am going to interviewing Matt Mullenweg at the end of the day!

Apple Inc. this fall plans to accelerate its assault on the 1 billion unit worldwide cell phone market with a second incarnation of its iPhone handset that will likely appeal to an even larger audience, AppleInsider has learned.

 The move is believed to be part of a broader, all-out blitz on the consumer electronics sector this holiday shopping season, in which a staggering array of gadgets from the Cupertino-based firm is expected to leave would-be rivals confused and unable to react.

Extremely reputable sources have told AppleInsider in recent weeks that the company’s iPhone roadmap for the 2007 calendar year includes not one but two distinct models, the second of which is set to turn up just months after the first.

According to one source, development of the second model has followed so closely on the heels of the inaugural iPhone that it was making its final pass through engineering around the same time that today’s model hit the manufacturing lines back in May or early June.

Conceived as a scaled back, lower cost alternative to today’s iPhone, the second iteration of the handset is presumed to marry iPod functionality with rudimentary cellular capabilities. More resource-heavy Internet browsing and e-mail capabilities are not expected of the device.

In providing the first visual descriptions of the handset, long-standing industry sources — who’ve continually been in tune with Apple’s future music directions — have dubbed the device “an iPhone nano” because they say it best describes the the handset’s overall form-factor and aesthetic.

Pricing of the new handset is expected to fall significantly below the $500+ asking cost of today’s iPhone models, these sources say, but not so much so as to pinch sales of an upcoming revision to the iPod nano.

Like today’s iPhone, the new model is expected to sport a revolutionary user interface, clues of which may have recently been revealed in a trio of patent filings.

The filings published earlier this month detailed telephone and text entry interfaces for a cellular-capable device via a virtual rotary click-wheel. One in particular described segmenting a click-wheel’s circular shape into various regions to enable quick phone dialing by sensing which region was touched.

(The near-simultanious appearance of these filings, ensuing scuffle amongst Wall Street analyst over the prospect of an iPhone nano, and the notion that a corresponding device is actually flirting with manufacturing ramp, all appear to be part of an eerie coincidence at this time.)

In a move that would stand in stark contrast to the June 29th iPhone launch, where supplies were exclusive to Apple and AT&T stores, there’s also some informed speculation amongst sources that the new model would be immediately available through a larger network of Apple third-party retailers and AT&T partners.

Further details will be published if and when information becomes available.

I must admit I’m a bit surprised that this slipped past me, so I hope I’m not the only one that didn’t realize Entourage can sync with the iPhone via its oft-forgotten ability to play well with Mac OS X’s Sync Services. According to this Apple support doc, switching on the preference you see above in Entourage 11.3.5 or later will break down the barriers between Entourage, Address Book and iCal, allowing iTunes to unite your iPhone and Entourage in beautiful synching harmony (however, as far as I can tell, iTunes won’t be able to sync your actual email accounts from Entourage).

If anyone has been using their iPhone with Entourage, please sound off on how this setup’s been treatin’ you.

So here is my review of the amazing Apple iPhone!

So after spending most of my Friday night at the Apple Store, I’ve finally been able to spend part of the last 2 hours or so playing around with the iPhone and, yep, it pretty much rocks.

There are of course much better and earlier reviews than mine so I’m not going to go into a lot of depth, but here are the top 10 things that I like about my new iPhone.

1. The battery life seems to be very strong. I listened to music for about 45 minutes on the way to work this morning. Made a few phone calls, watched a few YouTube videos, took some photos, added a few entries into the address book, etc. and all of this activity doesn’t seem to have made a dent in the battery. I have a feeling that even with very heavy use you are going to be able to keep a good charge on this thing.

2. I love how you can set a photo to person in your contact book and then a huge photo of their face pops up when caller ID identifies that it is them.

3. The photos from the camera a very useable. I’m not trading my Canon 5D in anytime soon, but for a camera in your pocket both the picture taking process and the results shine.

4. The phone synched really well with my Mac. All of my contacts from my address book are now on it and my 5 star rated songs are moved over.

5. I love how responsive it is to touch. the iPhone seems to get this really right. Pinch the screen and it gets bigger or smaller. slide your finger across the screen and it moves up or down.

6. The screen is amazingly vivid and bright. Visually it’s a delight.

7. The phone is amazingly intuitive. I gave it to my 5 year old son William and he was quickly able to navigate it. The single button design to return you to the homepage just feels right and the sliders are natural.

8. Great having touch volume controls on both the interface and on the side of the phone. As an iPod it works really well. Great volume. While driving I could easily reach down move the volume up and down by touch.

9. Great speaker quality. I wouldn’t say that listening to music outloud on the speaker is how you’d use this phone mostly, but the sound quality is very strong for a tiny phone. Songs kind of like a.m. radio, but definitely doable.

10. High quality YouTube videos. Of course much of this is copyrighted material, but the selection quality is high (I just finished watching Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” video), the videos seem to stream over Edge just fine but sometimes do take longer to load.

What don’t I like? Well besides the hated activation process, the internet and Google Maps do feel a bit slow. I played around on Zooomr with it for a little while which was cool, but I’m not sure I’d ever have the patience to be a heavy iPhone internet user.

I’m also not crazy about the keyboard. I’m sure I’ll get used to it, but I seem to make a lot of errors when typing. The keys feel really small and with the touch screen it seems pretty easy to mistype characters.

All in all though this is the best phone I’ve ever used. I would recommend this phone to anyone who might be considering it.

Piper Jaffray has an analyst report that’s making it’s way around the internet that says 95% of iPhone buyers in San Francisco, New York and Minneapolis purchased the 8GB model. Apparently over 500,000 of them were sold over the weekend.

 

Thanks for everybody’s patience for waiting for this amazing review!