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School for Bloggers: WordCamp Ottawa 2014 (#WCOttawa)

Oops, they did it again! The WordCamp Ottawa organizers pulled off an amazing conference this past weekend. For the price of $30, attendees drank in a full day and a half of informative sessions AND were fed lunch and snacks as well. It’s by far the best value for dollar of any conference I’ve ever been to. All up, 320 people registered for the 2014 edition of WordCamp Ottawa.

As mentioned in my earlier post, I was going to be speaking. My topic? “Writing Tips for Non-Writers (No Grammar Police Allowed!)” Here is what the room looked like about half an hour before my session was to start. Kind of big and intimidating, right?

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But I was very lucky. The people who showed up brought a great vibe, smiles, and tons of questions and discussion topics. I thoroughly enjoyed being a speaker and I can’t thank Jasmine Vesque, one of the organizers, enough for encouraging me to apply.

Due to yet another wave of sickness slipping under the doors of our home, I was unable to attend as many sessions as I would have liked. But of those that I did, I sure got a great deal out of them.

Here are my top 3 takeaways:

1) From Brian Rotsztein: “Every time you publish crap content, a puppy dies.” Wow. I am going to have to be a lot more careful now that I know this! Oh, and also, a great mind-mapping tool called Mindmeister that helps in generating ideas for content.

2) From Stephane Boisvert: A jaw-droppingly cool tool for A/B testing called Optimizely.

3) From Michel Fortin: A convincing case for using passive voice in your headlines.

If you were at WordCamp, please feel free to share your biggest “aha” moments and “golden nuggets” in the comments! And if you were one of the attendees in my session, THANK YOU for coming. Slides for my session are available here on SlideShare.

Comments

  1. Thank you for the shoutout! I appreciate you. I hope we can meet soon. I wish I would have attended your talk, but a pressing family matter took me away too soon.

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