WILLIAMEDIA

This last weekend I found myself in the company of many with their laptops open along with their minds ready for a new kind of conversation. WordPress is an open source project that has proven that to be open can mean success just as well as the traditional closed business model, even more so.

As a student of today I am ready to make my choice as a consumer to choose a product or services from business that operates openly. WordPress is one of those choices I have made and just because it is a leading product as a blog engine and content management system for people around the world including companies like the New York Times and CNN that is not the real reason I choose it.

What brings WordPress into the top ten is its cultivation of a community that surrounds it. A large part of the WordPress community is what I call the hybrid consumer. Some of the things that hybrid consumers do, especially when it comes to something like WordPress considering the fact its a free download, well they meet up with each other to talk about various topics related to WordPress and their blogs. The community provides the support for WordPress just do a google search on the phrase “WordPress” and you will find a capped number of 176,000,000 results of websites dedicated to discussing usage tips, and/or creating plug-ins and themes.

This last weekend I attended the first Dallas WordPress meet up, a meeting of people interested in blogging and helping each other in what ever we need to learn to use the popular tool. If your not familiar with WordPress don’t worry you can come too, even just to chat with people who are eager to be social. Sometimes its easy to forget that all this online stuff like facebook, myspace, and twitter is so we can find new friends to meet in real life in between going to work and managing our life responsibilities during the week. This last weekend we did just that and had lots of fun introducing ourselves to each other some for the first time.

To be honest I wrote a blog entry about calling a informal meeting fellow Dallas area bloggers and a then follow up blog entry after it became a sort of shot heard around the world thing when Charles Stricklin the guy in charge of the Dallas WordCamp contacted me about setting up a meetup.com account for me to better organize the planned local meet up of interested people. From then on I became the organizer of the Dallas WordPress meet up one of only six in the world and I hope you will find the time to come to one. We have them every month and the next one is planned for May 24th 2008. Location plus other information can be found at wordpress.meetup.com/178

Skyline photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshbousel/145573511/