Greek Blogger Camp 2007

As probably none of you (poor souls) who read this blog know, i’m of Swedish origin, but i’ve lived on the island of Ios in Greece the past 10 years. And today i found myself in an interesting event, namely the Greek Blogger Camp 2007.

My day job is basically being a technician for anything and everything computer related on this little island, and i was setting up a WDS wireless network today for Ios Palace, the hotel the Greek Blogger Camp was taking place at. I helped them out to get networking and some stuff working :) .

I found the event itself very interesting, and i met some really cool people :D .

Matt Mullenweg, the creator of Wordpress, Steve Smith from orderedlist.com, and a lot of Greek bloggers were there. Unfortunately i’m not to familiar with the Greek blogsphere since my Greek isn’t exactly fluent (oops).

First up to speak was Steve Smith, he held a very in-depth presentation about web-development and most specifically web standards, and how important they are. Its good to see someone more fanatic about standards and perfection than myself… hehe. What i found most interesting was the Q&A after his presentation, where he answered multiple questions about how to communicate with clients whom you’re building sites for, how you promote a new site, and more. Unfortunately i didn’t catch all of it since i was there to setup a wireless network for the hotel (the evil day job strikes again *wishes he was rich* ^_^ ).

Next up was Panos Sambrakos, he talked about an interesting ad campaign he seemingly was in charge of at OgilvyInteractive for Toyota (again, i missed parts here and there, friggin day job… lol). The idea behind the ad campaign was to have the advertiser listen to the customers, rather than just feed potential customers with fixed single-sided information via tv, radio, news papers, and online banner ads. Cause the world is moving away from listening to radio, watching tv (must be one to two years ago i last watched tv myself). The idea was to let a few of the bigger greek bloggers test-drive the car, and then let them post their opinions of the car, wether positive, or negative. It worked well, and it was an interesting presentation :)

During the Q&A with Panos, i asked if there had been a lot of spam and general abuse of the central blog they had setup to collect all the posts from the bloggers who test drove the car. Thankfully, they hadn’t had much spam at all. I also pointed out that i thought that they had done a good job to stuck to the no censoring rule, unlike Microsoft did with their Vista laptops around February (Matt Mullenweg pointed out to me that it was the ad firm that had pulled the laptops back after first giving them away, and not Microsoft themselves, mah bad :$ ).

I had a chance to talk to Steve for a while before it all got started this morning, it was very interesting :D (If you’re reading this Steve, i was stalking you for a bit ;) ). During the coffee break and after the event i had a chance to talk some of the bloggers aswell :) . All in all, it was great. And i’m looking forward to the 2nd half of the event tomorrow morning.

Hopefully everybody will be able to make it, and wont be too hung over. I ran into most of the people who was there in the village tonight (its about 3am right now), out partying and drinking (Ios being a party island and all). I showed a bunch of them around to a few good bars, i would mention names, but i’m terrible with remembering names off the top of my head (sowwy :$ ).

Overall, i think its a great event, and awesome that it took place here on Ios, and i hope it will next year too (if i’m still living here, who knows what’ll happen in a year… lol)

Anyway now i’m going to bed, and hopefully when i wake up, my ears wont be ringing, and my brain cells can hear each other from the loud music in the bars here… lol… Was my first time out this year (yeah, the day job again heh), and i guess i’d forgotten just how loud most places play their music, its all good tho :D (as long as its good music (or you’re drunk), and you’re not trying to talk to someone ^_^ )