• In a room of around 50 people, more than 3 had written their own plugins
• More than 5 were pro-bloggers
• Over half had customized their themes
• More than 10 wrote their OWN themes from scratch
• NO one agreed on the most important WordPress Plugin

This last one surprised me – I had expected a quick concensus on, perhaps the Ultimate SEO plugin, or maybe one of the social bookmarking ones. In fact, people didn’t even agree on the best stats tracking service. Obviously included:

• Google Analytics
• WordPress Stats
• Performancing
• Feedburner
• MyBlogLog (not exactly pure stats)

After the conference, I started working on distilling my many, varied experiences into a few coherent blog posts. Following my (long-ago) background in journalism, I looked around for a quick outside edit before I posted anything – and discovered, to my dismay, that you can’t share draft posts. What?

What followed was a quick IM exchange with Lloyd Budd, the rockstar “Community Guy” at Automattic, and an old friend of mine from the Netscape 8 days. He quickly confirmed that draft posts can’t be shared, and suggested I simply email the content of the post to a few friends. Arg.

All of which serves as preamble for yesterday’s message from Lloyd:

10:04:27 PM Lloyd Budd: I remember you looking for a plugin like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/shareadraft/ recently
10:06:07 PM JustJosh: AWESOME
10:06:11 PM JustJosh: perfect, thank you very much
10:06:22 PM Lloyd Budd: my pleasure

This is now my new favorite plugin. It simply lets you share (for a defined period of time, like 2 hours) the draft view of a new post with, well, anyone.

In the spirit of our NorthernVoice talk, what’s YOUR favorite WordPress plugin – and why?

Key Takeaways:

• What does the citizen get out of it?
• Who participates?
• Why is CBC doing it? What are they getting out of it?
• CBC doesn’t give credit, except for photos. No link love.
• CBC asks for what they want – on air, and online.

The Progressive Economics Forum – Chief Economist / Blogger, Andrew Jackson. Marc Lee. So far just talking simple technology of setting up blogs – DreamHost, picking a theme, getting a domain name. Nothing specific about motivating activism yet.

Extent of “ripple effect” is limited to Technorati, and promotion to”Progressive Bloggers“.

700-1000 page views per day avg.

Intersections with Mainstream media – “A number of times when I’ve made a post, have led to mainstream media contacting for an interview. It just happened, not promoted. No mediaroom section on the blog.”

If you want media coverage of your blog, put that all in the mediaroom. Make it easier to capture.

Watch the Comments on the posts (via RSS, etc.), sometimes the first comment can derail the whole thread.

The DMCA is being used to shutdown dissenting voices in the US. Hosting companies will generally shut down the blog first, ask questions later.

TAKEAWAY: Use a Canadian web host to avoid the DMCA, or try:

• koumbit.org
• http://theorem.ca/

What about using Reddit/Digg for collecting Canadian political content? Try using the Canadian Reddit section.