This past weekend, I had the exciting experience of attending WordCamp Toronto. In the past, I’ve attended conferences for career consultants, for professional organizers, and for virtual assistants, but this is the first time I’ve ever attended a major event where the participants worked in a variety of industries. Of course, there were lots of other website designers there, but there were also professional and hobby bloggers as well as lots of people exploring the possibilities of WordPress.

I heard that there were about 200 people there, but since I’m not exactly a social butterfly, I only met a small percentage of them. Today I’d like to tell you about a few of the interesting folks I met.

Kathryn Presner of Zoonini Web Services and I have known each other for several years, but this was the first time we’ve met face-to-face. We worked together closely from 2005 to 2006, when I led the Website Redevelopment Committee for Professional Organizers in Canada and she had the daunting task of bringing our vision to life. I was on the fence about signing up for WordCamp until I learned that Kathryn was going to be one of the speakers, and I’m so glad I took advantage of the chance to meet her and hear her presentation.

I also met Ruth Maude of Dandelion Web Design. Ruth and I actually have met in person, many years ago. She beat me to blogging about our story, so if you’d like to know how we are connected, I’ll let you read her write-up of WordCamp Toronto Day 1.

A couple of the people I met have very specific niche markets, which I always find very interesting. Alex Frakking of Visible Optometry designs WordPress sites exclusively for optometrists, and Martha Chan is VP of Marketing for Divorce Marketing Group who serve only divorce professionals.

Of course, there’s no way I can squeeze all the details of a day and a half of networking and learning into one blog entry, but I came away with lots of great ideas and information which I’ll share with you in future posts.