The organizer Simon Lim told me that about 150 people had registered, and there will be attendees and speakers from Singapore, Indonesia, Cambodia and more.

Looking at the full schedule, I can see the sessions will cover a wide range of WordPress topics. I’m looking forward to learning more about blogging and WordPress in this part of the world.

WordCamp Malaysia’s Twitter account is @wordcampmy and the hastag is #wcmy.

I got to go there along with Mark and Noel from Automattic.

WordCamp Fukuoka T-Shirts

The main hall presentation opened from a talk by Ned Watson. He was funny and really enthusiastic. He’s already planning for WordCamp Fukuoka 2011 I liked what he said: “Bring a friend, and we’ll have 400 people next year”

I went to watch Yasuhiro Yamada talk about the difference between WordPress and Movable Type.

In he afternoon, I presented on a topic about the power and appeal of WordPress, covering its openness, expansibility, and community. My slides are in Japanese but it’s on Slideshare.

Presentation by Contact Form 7 Author Takayuki Miyoshi

I really enjoyed Takayuki‘s presentation a lot. It was only for 30 minutes but I wish he kept talking! It was about how he got involved in WordPress and how his plugin Contact Form 7 grew to become one of the most popular ones. It was nothing about big promotion or even a well-planned strategy. He just kept making it better for users, and provided a way for others to help him in areas like translation.

Later on, I got on the stage to interpret Noel’s “Directed Design” presentation and Mark’s lightening talk on the official Plugin Directory. I heard a lot of good feedback about both of their talk.

There was an after-party with 100+ people at a nearby hall. There were some mini-presentations, sushi, beer, shochu and WordCamp cake

WordCamp Fukuoka Cake

Local bakery Strawberry Fields did an amazing job with the logo. Tasted great too…

WordCamp Fukuoka seemed to have inspired many people in Fukuoka as well as visitors from all around Japan. I was certainly impressed with the WordPress user & web developer community in Fukuoka. Now the organizers of WordCamp Yokohama (scheduled for May 29th this year) are getting busy planning for an even better one!

Awesome organizer/facilitator/babysitter Masanori Hashimoto of Nulab had written a report w/ photos: WordCamp Fukuoka 2010 finished!

You can see more photos on Flickr tag #wcfukuoka2010.

The speaker includes Contact Form 7 plugin author Takayuki Miyoshi (takayukister), P2/Monotone/Duotone theme author Noel Jackson, Time, Inc. consultant/developer Ned Watson, Frogman Office designer Yuki Yamaguchi, and paperboy&co. engineer Manno Junji (ecogrammer).

The idea for this WordCamp started from last year’s WordCamp NYC. Masanori Hashimoto, attendee & sponsor of WCNYC was so inspired by the event that he decided doing a WordCamp in Fukuoka. I’m excited to see such influence from one WordCamp to another, because that’s how I got involved in organizing WordCamps myself after attending one in San Francisco in 2007. I’m sure a lot of good things will come out of this event too.

Some Facts:

• This WordCamp is the 4th one in Japan (hopefully followed by more in other cities later in the year!).
• Almost 200 event attendees & 100 after-party signups at this time. Largest attendance for WordCamp in Japan so far.
• The “Genius Bar” will be held at a Japanese tearoom. I’m sure that’s the first time ever

You can follow their Twitter account @wcfukuoka2010 or #wcfukuoka2010 hashtag.

I don’t think it’s a well-known fact outside of Japan but blogging is pretty big over there. As seen in one of the slide, there are more than 27 million hosted blog accounts across 68 services, according to a research [ja] done by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. WordPress userbase is growing too – especially in the past year.

The reason in short is that it’s a free and open platform to build upon. For example, a lot of people in Japan choose WordPress because of the availability of plugins that enables mobile device more accessible. And the strong community through WordCamps and meetups in addition to online interaction is helping it a lot as well.

I’ll write more about this topic and other presentations that followed (also on internationalization of WordPress) later. Now, I’m off to another day of WordCamp NYC!

Related:

WordCamp NYC 2009 Blog: WordPress Community in Japan

WordPress Community in Japan

Japanese use of WordPress is growing fast. The number of downloads has quadrupled in a year and half, and the number of local user groups has grown to 27 since April. This presentation will cover the blogging trend in Japan, how they use WordPress, WordCamps and meetups in Japan, differences and similarities to the U.S. community, and more.

This WordCamp is going to be huge! Not only it’s held over 2 days (14th & 15th), there will be over 50 sessions in 8 tracks. Sessions include hands-on workshops, advanced topics, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg’s Q&A sessions, CMS/BuddyPress/MU related presentations, and many more.

There will be a hacker room where you can “just code” with core developers (2.9 Bug Hunt will take place here).

I’m really excited to talk about Japanese WordPress community in a WordCamp outside of Japan. Blogging has grown to be a pretty big deal in Japan, and WordPress is growing steadily. Even if you aren’t exactly sure if you want to know about WordPress in Japan, I think you can learn a tip or two for expanding your open source project / business / blog internationally.

WordCamp NYC “regular” registration ends today! If you want to make sure you get a special event T-shirt, make sure to get your ticket before the end of day (EST)!

Quick Facts:

• WordCamp Kyoto was the third WordCamp in Japan, first one outside of Tokyo
• 150 attendees total + about 15 staff + 15 sponsors
• Kyoto is the 7th largest city by the population, and is close to Osaka (3rd)

This event was organized in a month or so (which isn’t all too bad – I found that the more time you have, the longer it takes). Kyoto Research Park (KRP) hosted the 1st day & gave a pretty good discount for the venue on the 2nd day. Having sponsors also helped covering the cost. Many of past WordCamp Tokyo volunteers helped out preparing and as staff on both days.

Day 1: “Business Day”

Photo by yorozu2009 on Flickr

• Ktai Style (mobile plugin) presentation by Yuriko Ikeda was highly anticipated and appreciated as always.
• Contact Form 7 author Takayuki Miyoshi talked about using WordPress as a customer support tool (he’s working on a new plugin called Support Tickets).
• There was an instruction of real-time collaborative drawing tool “Cacoo“, which just opened up for closed beta testing. It lets you create charts and wireframes. Its WordPress plugin is coming soon.
• “WordPress Business Community” WPbiz was also introduced. It’s going to be as site with business directory & forums for Japanese business users.

Day 2: “Community Day”

Photo by waviaei on Flickr

I did a presentation on brief history & current state of WordPress. Other topics: DB backup, search/content filtering plugin, Thematic theme framework, GPL commercial theme, server optimization, and Q & A session.
We tried to pick topics based on the past WordCamp survey (Organizers: after-event survey is important! You can get a better bigger picture from this than random feedback).

We did a “video letter” of Matt on both days (Thanks to Matt, Michael P & Ryan M!).

Lightening talks

Each speaker had 5 minutes to talk about various topics: NPO & WordPress, backing up WordPress files with uuenview + Gmail, introducing new WordPress book (by the author), CakePHP & WordPress integration, & Generating Flash xml using custom fields.

Photo by odysseygate on Flickr

After-party

We held the after-party at a banquet hall in the same building. That was a good choice because people had time to hang out at the lounge after the main event & didn’t have any trouble finding the place. It was easy for the staff as well. Everyone seemed to enjoy the layout of the hall.

You can check out Flickr photos for WordCamp Kyoto (for some reason, Japanese WP users also love photos & cameras. This seems like a worldwide trend?).

The 2-day event will consist of a series of talks on Friday (targeted for hosting companies and other businesses) and a larger conference & after-party on Saturday.

I will be the keynote/opening speaker for the “Community Day”. I’m going to cover the overview of what’s happening around the WordPress world in Japan and worldwide.

I know it’s so late to blog this but here are the details in English.

WordCamp Kyoto 2009

Location

Kyoto Research Park (KRP)

Date & Time

Business Day: Friday, October 16th (15:00 – 16:15)
Community Day: Saturday, October 17th (10:00 -16:15 / After-party: 17:00 – 19:00)

Fee

Free (Business Day) / 1,000 yen (Community Day) / 4,500 yen (After-Party)

Speakers

All of the presentation will be in Japanese, except for WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg’s subtitled video message. Speakers will gather from all around Japan, including Yuriko Ikeda (Ktai plugin author) from kawasaki and Takayuki Miyoshi (Contact Form 7 plugin author) from Fukuoka. Please visit the schedule page for more details.

Registration

Go to the sign up page. Registration will be closing at 23:59 (JST) on October 10th.

You can follow the updates on the event’s official web site, kyoto.wordcamp.org, or on Twitter (@wordcamp_kyoto and #wckyoto09). No live streaming is planned, but videos will be uploaded to WordPress.tv afterward.

Please feel free to leave a comment & contact me if you want to ask questions in English!

WordCamp Tokyo 2009 took place on Sunday, April 12th at Kasai Kumin Kaikan in Edogawa-ku, Tokyo. We had reserved the venue because it was one of a few affordable choices we had for 100+ seats hall. Last year, all 80 tickets were sold out in a little more than 24 hours. We didn’t want that to happen again, so we picked a place where we didn’t have to worry about the same situation.

This year we had about 180 registrants; 150 attendees showed up (excluding about 20 staff + speakers). Although we didn’t fill the 450-seat room, we were very pleased with the growing interests. The length of the event was also extend to full-day from only having afternoon sessions last year.

The sessions consisted of 8 regular (10-30 minutes) speakers and 4 lightening talk (5 minutes) speakers. Matt Mullenweg came to Japan for the first time to speak. Michael Pick from Automattic, who spoke last year in Tokyo, talked about WordPress.tv. Other speakers’ topics included tips on plugin & theme development, dissection of Japanese language support plugin, Ktai (cell phone/mobile) blogging, and advantage of using WordPress in web dev businesses.

I thought it was interesting that there were so many questions submitted (we asked people to turn in written questions after the lunch break) for Matt’s Q & A time. We ended up adding some more time for him to answer questions on stage because of it. Some of the questions made me realize that we as a localization team need to be communicating better with Japanese users. That is, some things we take for granted are not necessariy well understood among other users. I hope to make an improvement on that through blogs and documentation in the future.

After-party was literally packed! Seemed like people had a lot of fun meeting old friends & new acquaintances. It’s a rare occasion for us Japanese localization team to get together all at once, so that was nice as well.

Now a week after the whole thing, WordBench.org (local WordPress fan community site using BuddyPress) added about 100 more users. I hope it’s an indication that people at WordCamp realized how fun it is to meet others in person to talk & learn about WordPress.

I want to thank everyone who came, spoke, and helped this WordCamp Tokyo. I also want to say thanks to all those who have been contributing to WordPress project; WordCamp will not exist without everyone who is making WordPress an awesome software.

Photo credit: odysseygate. You can find more WordCamp Tokyo 2009 photos on Flickr.

SxSW

I was in Austin, TX for SxSW 2009 from March 13-18. This was my third trip (went in 05 & 06) and definitely not going to be the last one.

What I liked:

• Leah Buley (slide), CSS Showdown, Microformats panel, Gary Vaynerchuk (video)
• WordPress Lunch at Conjunctured co-working space
• EllisLab Party & Breakfast (More on Expression Engine 2.0 Preview is on their blog)
• Tumblr Party

What I didn’t like:

• The Convention Center’s floor plan. One time I ended up on the first floor trying to get to the third. Yes, I tend to get lost pretty easy, but still.
• AT & T connection was so bad, we were emailing & using twitter message over wifi instad of texting.
• I probably missed too many good panels.

There are many anectodotal experiences to explain how special this event is, but I’ll just leave it at that for now.

WordCamp Tokyo 2009 & WordCamp Kansai Party

We opened up registeration for WordCamp Japan events in April (April 10th in Osaka & 12th in Tokyo). Total of over 100 people signed up in less than 24 hours!

It’s been a crazy process to try to get so many things figured out for the events. Okay, I just complained a little about SxSW venue but I do have so much more respect for people organizing big events now.

This year’s event is going to be bigger than last year‘s — I can’t wait to be meet many more WordPress users in Japan. Matt (Mullenweg) and Michael Pick from Automattic will be there too.

Ferndale WordPress Meetup

Our first WordPress meetup went really well. I was worried only a couple people would show up, but ended up having 10 people. I heard a lot of “when is the next one?” “we should do this more often!” so I think people were pretty happy that they came. Thanks for coming! I also have to thank this guy for helping me & making it happen.

My goal is to grow WordPress community in the area and to have a WordCamp in Michigan someday!

The event in Cleveland took place this Monday, so I drove down see what it’s all about.

The topics I personally found most interesting were “How to Bring FOSS to the Mainstream” (Adam Siemienski) and “Business Implications and Users of Free and Open Source Software” (Panel Discussion).

The map on official event site shows there is a pin suggesting a group in Michigan (not much more info…). Next year, I hope to hear more about this event in Michigan as well!