Tiffany Weller and I made our way out of the South Bay and over to Santa Monica yesterday for some afternoon co-working at the Casa Del Mar before making our way over to the Mahalo office for the Social Media Club. While co-working Brian found out that no one had taken care of getting the drinks (besides soda) so we made our way over to Trader Joe’s to stock up:

[caption id=”attachment_54″ align=”aligncenter” width=”301″ caption=”Tiffany holding down the wine”][/caption]

As you can see this was vital for a good event and Tiffany was a hit:

[caption id=”attachment_55″ align=”aligncenter” width=”301″ caption=”Tiffany serving up some wine”][/caption]

The theme for the panel was “A Social Media Primer” and was moderated by Jackie Peters from Heavybag Media and the panel members included social media pioneer Brian Solis and local social media rock stars; Robert Richman, Michael Dorausch and Nicole Jordan.

[caption id=”attachment_56″ align=”aligncenter” width=”399″ caption=”SMCLA Panel at the Mahalo Offices in Santa Monica”][/caption]

The one question from that panel that really stood out to me was “who owns social media?” Everyone wants to know what section of a company (marketing, pr, customer service). I’m working on a post covering this and it should be posted tomorrow.

Now, the best pic of the night:

[caption id=”attachment_57″ align=”aligncenter” width=”400″ caption=”Brian Solis, Shira Lazar, and Jeffrey Henderson”][/caption]

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Jackie Peters can be found online at the following sites:

Jackie Peter’s LinkedIn

Jackie Peters BlogFlux

Jackie Peters Twitter

Jackie Peters Crowdvine

At first I thought the window cleaning guys were getting a little crazy outside but then I realized I’m in LA and it was actually the frickin earth shaking!

Details on the quake

Unless there are serious aftershocks the optimizing will now continue

The longer I use Wordpress for our blog and other sites I build the more and more I love it’s flexibility and ease of use. From complicated ecommerce sites to simple 10 pages sites for non-techie clients Wordpress’s simplicity makes it easy to teach people how to use and even modify their site without being dependent on anyone.

Here are my favorite plugins that make Wordpress great!

All in One SEO Pack

Provides all your SEO abilities in one easy to use plug-in.

AJAX Comments

Lets users add comments without having to refresh the page using Web 2.0 AJAX goodness.

Askimet

This comes packaged by default with Wordpress but it’s vital you get an API key and activate this plug in, that is unless you want to help spammers sell viagra.

Dofollow

Why let Google outsource it’s quality control to you?? Add the dofollow plugin to remove the “rel=”nofollow” attribute from comments on your site.

Google XML Sitemaps

This tool is great for easily adding an XML Sitemap to your site so Google can better index you, especially if your entire site is built in Wordpress.

Sociable

Automatically adds links to the bottom of every post/page (at your discretion) that allows your users to easily submit and up-vote (hopefully) your content.

Wordpress Back Up Tool

Great tool for people who can’t handle phpMyAdmin for pulling a database backup. (back up early and often!!)

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade

This tool makes it easy to upgrade your site to the latest version of Wordpress without having to play with FTP. Just make sure you back up your site first and navigate to http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/update.php after running this to make sure you update your database.

Know any other cool plugins?? Please leave links in the comments.

Back on June 24th Ryan Naraine did a post on the ZDNet blog likening Apple’s bundling of additional software with their security updates as Badware Behavior. I had seen these updates and while I agreed at the time this was pretty questionable Apple at least had the courtesy to separate new software from the actual security update.

It appears that today Apple has reached a new low by actually bundling iTunes with their Quicktime update, forcing you to add iTunes to keep Quicktime up to date and secure.

This set off alarms as I don’t have nor do I want iTunes installed on my computer yet Apple seems to think I should.

Come on Apple, I’m just not cool enough to use an ‘i’ anything so please stop rubbing it in.