During our stay on Oahu for the Social Media Club Workshop, Podcamp and Wordcamp Hawai’i, and a little leisure time – Eliza and I stayed at the Wyland Waikiki hotel.

This modern hotel showcases some of Wyland’s (whose name is Robert Wyland, by the way) artwork on nearly every surface available. Wall-sized paintings, sculptures, surf boards, and even tile works on the bottom one of the hotel’s pools all show off the creativity of Wyland.

The rooms are a decent size with all of the amenities that you’d come to expect nowadays. Beautiful flat-panel televisions, high beds, and nice bathrooms. Eliza and I had a room with a fridge and a sink (no range to cook on). We both really enjoyed our stay here.

Not that you spend a lot of time in your hotel when you are in Hawai’i, but I still think it is important to find one that suits your lifestyle. The Xbox-filled gaming room suits my lifestyle, though I admit I didn’t end up using it. The bar in the lobby with some of the better tenders I’ve come across, suits my lifestyle. The free wifi throughout the property, does as well.  Though, I must say that only having wired access in the rooms was a bit disappointing.  But Eliza and I quickly took care of that with Mac OS X’s internet connection sharing which is drop dead simple to set up.

Why am I writing about this hotel? Because they were extremely accommodating. They helped out the Podcamp attendees and speakers and also were always on hand when we wanted to chat about the hotel. Something I have never, ever heard of with any other hotel.

And, in the very near future, if you head down to one of the lobby’s two iMacs – you may see Viddler sitting on the desktop ready for you to record your video testimonial for this excellent hotel.

In October Eliza and I will be heading to Oahu, Hawaii for a Social Media Summit in Waikiki. Shortly after that we’ll be attending both Podcamp Hawaii and Wordcamp Hawaii.

I don’t think it needs to be said that we’re both looking forward to attending these events.

In November, shortly after our return, I’ll be heading to New York City for Carsonified‘s Future of Web Design conference. I will have some exciting things to talk to developers about, regarding Viddler‘s new Developer Partner Program, and I think FOWD is the perfect venue for these discussions.

If there is anything in the culinary world more centering than pizza I don’t know what it is. We all have our favorite toppings, styles, and even ways to eat it. Folded in half, the way all true New Yorkers do, maybe two pieces on top of each other, or even eating it backwards crust-to-tip.

No matter what kind of pizza you like, you will always hunt down your favorite style no matter where you go in life. I remember when my brother moved from New Jersey to South Dakota (don’t ask). He had a laundry list of things he missed in New Jersey. On the top of that list was, of course, pizza. Kyle Slattery says that his family often picks up a few pies of their favorite pizza in a completely different state to take it home on the plane to warm up later!

My favorite style is New York style. Thin crust, tons of grease, served with attitude. When I was in San Francisco in July of 2007 for Wordcamp I searched my then newly purchased iPhone for “pizza” on the Google Maps app. The moment I saw “New York Style pizza” pop up I practically jogged the few blocks to Arinell Pizza.

Upon entering Arinell Pizza I knew I was in the right place. The line was out the door and halfway down the block. The music playing in the background was some sort of late-80s hard rock. The guys behind the counter only accepted cash, rarely washed their hands, and had hair well below their shoulders. Oh, and they gave you about 8 seconds to make up your mind about what you wanted.

A woman in front of me had called in her order. Two large pies with a single topping each. “Twenty five bucks.” said the longer haired guy taking the money after he had just tossed a new, fresh batch of dough into the air for the next few pizzas. The guy behind me, who hadn’t gotten his pizza yet, asked a few questions and was kicked out. Literally. I knew I was right where I needed to be for good pizza.

I was not disappointed. The pizza was delicious and I plan on stopping at Arinell Pizza every time I visit San Francisco and have a craving for really good, New York style, pizza.

I’m not sure what reminded me of this photograph I took with my iPhone of the sign at Arinell Pizza, or why I wanted to be sure I posted about it on my blog. But something did and so now I’ve done just that.

Arinell Pizza is at 509 Valencia St. in San Francisco, California. I highly recommend you have a slice. Bring cash and order quickly.

10:45am – The first session of the day HyperDB and High Performance WordPress lead by Barry Abrahmson and Matt Mullenweg focused on making WordPress run smoothly when dealing with high traffic sites or even small personal sites that end up getting on sites like Slashdot and Digg.

A few tips if you do not use any caching and yet you’ve found your site down because of a Digg. There are a few options that were suggested. The first is to modify your .htaccess file and limit access to your site to only your personal IP Address. Then, create an index.html file of the post that is getting all of the traffic. Next, FTP into your site and create the same directory structure on your file system as your post has (i.e. /notes/wordcamp07-day2/ for this post) and upload the index.html into that file. Don’t forget to edit your .htaccess file again to allow everyone back in again.

After that I’d suggest installing WP-Cache, a free plugin, so that this type of thing doesn’t happen again.

11:00am – “Blogs at the New York Times” by Jeremy Zilar is focusing mainly on the struggles of training people to use WordPress, upgrading multiple copies, and just general workflow for their authors and how they use WordPress at the New York Times.

Something interesting that the New York Times blogs does is have “comment of the moment” which spans across off of the New York Times blogs. Many social networks will highlight specific content but not usually highlight comments. I like it.

11:15am – Designing massively multiplayer social systems lead by Rashmi Sinha, Ph.D. is focusing on how to design massively social systems like SlideShare. (View her slide presentation here.)

Notes: Interaction occurs around objects not “just connecting” like; coffee, concerts, wordcamp, etc. Even tag searches are “objects” that people virtually “gather” around. I don’t like that she is limiting interaction models to only four, though she didn’t say they are the only models.

Side notes: Slideshare was built as “the Flickr, or YouTube, of Powerpoint presentations…”. “Did you know that 5th graders do their homework in Powerpoint?” Church 2.0 (clergy are using them in churches). “Powerpoint pornography, does exist”.

Designing for the individual: Usability. Can you find information. Quickly access what you are looking for. Documentation clear, concise.

Designing for groups: How are people interacting? How will people share? “Group think”, or Wisdom Of Crowds, says that you can intelligent decisions being made by a group of people only if certain rules are kept and followed. The system must encourage everyone to be individuals, yet work together. Popularity is one of the most important things on social networks. Unfortunately: The rich gets richer.

11:45am – Almost time for lunch. I’m starving! I just posted my MeToday video, that I did this morning before WordCamp was really full.

Regarding Apple, Inc. “They do invidual design very well. They can’t do social design at all.”. Wow. I’m not sure I get this blanket statement, and I suppose I should take it with a grain of salt. Maybe I will email her.

“Any other activities, besides favoriting and tagging, to gauge popularity?” Favoriting and tagging “go together” on Slideshare. If you favorite something, you are asked also to tag it. (I like this feature). “You don’t get the same credit for favoriting, as you do for commenting.”

Rashmi is taking questions from the audience.

BBQ Lunch!! Wow. That was some delicious BBQ! It felt good to be able to eat, unlike yesterday.

2:15pm – I’m recording parts of Dave Winer’s discussion about the Past, Present, and Future of Web Publishing which has touched on some very interesting points. He touched on future-safing your data/content as well as opening up social networks so that users do not get “siloed” into using the service. Example: Facebook’s APIs all point inward, and not outward.

The video for Dave’s presentation is now available on Viddler.

5:15pm – The last few presentations for the day included Liz’s presentation on how they are going through the WordPress admin testing it for usability issues and planning the next (or 2.4) version that will, hopefully, feature many improvements to the WP-admin.

Matt Mullenweg did a presentation on “The State of the Word” (video now available here) updating everyone on what has happened with WordPress since the last WordCamp in 2006. Impressive numbers, huge growth, and many plans for the future. (I have a good portion of this on video and will be publishing it on Viddler the moment that iMovie “does its thing”).

Fantastic weather!

However, the entire first morning was pretty good, panel wise. The first panel on Podcasting was a cross between telling novices what a Podcast is and an advertisment for PodPress, a WordPress plugin to help the Podcaster. Not that PodPress isn’t worth its own session (it seems to be a pretty large project), but it seems that people wanted less milk and more meat and potatoes.

The session on Blogging vs. Journalism with John C. Dvorak and Om Malik (iPhone photo here) was an enjoyable discussion that involved the audience a lot more than I thought they would. Kudos to Om and John for involving everyone as much as they did while keeping the topic at the forefront. I’m hoping to get a short interview with Om Malik today.

When lunch break hit, I was hurting pretty badly. So I ended up sitting just outside the Swedish American Hall for a while and finally, while Om and I were speaking outside, Om said: “Go get some rest buddy.”. Good advice.

I hope today goes much better, I’m looking forward to getting into the more developer side of things today and hopefully I can get some content up on the WordCamp tag on Viddler today.

As you can see from this list of attendees I won’t be alone either! WordCamp looks like it is shaping up to be a really great weekend jammed full of great information.

I’ll be in San Francisco from Friday evening until Tuesday morning. I’m looking forward to meeting up with all of the WordCamp attendees as well as some of my friends in the San Francisco area. I’ll also be meeting up with the Viddler iPhone contest winner Edwin Villanueva to personally hand him his iPhone! I’ll have some free time in the evenings and on Monday so if you’re going to be in the San Francisco area and would like to say hi, drop me a line.

Also – if anyone is going to be near SFO on Friday evening around 5pm EST and wouldn’t mind picking up someone from the airport, that’d be cool too.

Kyle Neath has kindly allowed me to hitch a ride to the Avalonstar miniPrix right after I get off the plane. Thanks Kyle! You rock.

See you in California!