The room is pretty empty, I guess most of the people stayed late at the Yahoo! party. He first offered the keynote to Sergy, then to MSN and then to Tim O'Reilly. So he decided to just talk about WebmasterWorld and where it is going to go. He asked if anyone here has not visited WMW, and a few people raised their hands. WMW does what they can to build a community, through the focus of a webmaster target. Brett says he hasn't changed much, he predicts over the next 6 - 9 months, he will be changing things. Everyone can have their own personal blogs at WMW, they are not sure how exactly its going to work. He is going to try to actually sell the WMW software, 98% done. WMW is going to move to CSS shortly, he is going to bite the bullet and do that, mainly because of the bandwidth savings and code clean up. They are going to spin off some new domains, new forums and sub domains to make it easier for people to find things. They are going to expand to more forums, like databases, specific search engines, break down the european forums. He then asked how many people are members of the supporters forum, most raised their hand. WMW is hiring perl programmers and general 'net techs' (people who get the picture), he said they do not want to turn into what SearchEngineForums turned into.
Q & A:
Q: John from ClickTracks asked, he said he is a vendor and he avoided participating in WMW because he didn't want to "pitch" his product? Any advice. A: When questions come up, Brett said that we want you to come in an answer them. He said, often people ask questions just to pitch. Its a touch call.
Q: Do you see WMW becoming more politically active like SEMPO, etc? A: No, we will leave it alone.
Q: What is the scope on the newsletter? A: If they can hire someone to free up some of his time, they will do it. It takes a full day out of a week to do he said.
Q: Will there be a PubCon this afternoon? A: Yes, this afternoon they will announce it.
Q: Will there be printed books coming out? A: He is half done with a book, he contributed to Google Hacks and an O'Reilly book.
Q: Will you be video taping these sessions? A: No, most the search reps will not allow it anyway.
