The second edition of WordCamp Montreal will happen this weekend at Agora Hydro-Quebec located at UQAM Coeur des Sciences. You get a chance to learn from twenty speakers that will share tips on how to make the best of WordPress.

Media Sidekick’s technical advisor Jerome Paradis is one of the speakers. In case you did not know, Jerome is also my wonderful husband. Jerome will talk about best practices regarding:

• How to integrate Facebook and Twitter to WordPress comments and login
• The Facebook Open Graph and what it means for bloggers
• How, when (and when not) to use shortlinks
• How to build new relationships through your blog
• How to track your blog’s influence

Most of his findings are based on on-going experiments that we run on my lifestyle blog At Home with Kim Vallee. Do not miss his session. It’s called “Raise and measure your blog’s influence with Twitter and Facebook”.

The $40 registration fee gives access to 2 days of expert talks, a t-shirt, lunch, and your participation to giveaways for a chance to win Abode products and 2 iPads. Register now!

+ WordCamp Montreal

I bought an iPad Friday night. I browsed all night exploring Flipboard and reading the digital magazines I subscribed to with Zinio. I loved it! By Sunday night, I was ready to bring back my iPad to the Apple store due to the lack of support for decent bookmarking and sharing tools.

As a curator, I depend a lot on bookmarklets to do my job. A bookmarklet is a one-click functionality that you typically drag to the toolbar of your browser. Good examples are “Shorten with bit.ly”, or “Bookmark on Delicious”. Sadly, you cannot add bookmarklets to the Safari browser running on your iPhone or iPad.

Like I said, I depend on bookmarklets to easily share must-read articles. I used a custom URL shortener (via Bitly.Pro) to share links. And I bookmark ideas and research materials for future articles on Delicious. These simple tasks done on a computer suddenly become cumbersome to do on an iPad. Therefore, I was ready to give up when my geek husband found me a solution. It is not perfect but it greatly reduces the burden of these tasks on the iPad.

The trick is to create a bookmark and then, to paste the proper Javascript as the URL. I wish to send a HUGE thank to Chris Bray for compiling the different Javascript and sharing his neat trick. So far, Chris shared how to run 16 bookmarkets on your iPad. But frankly, I cannot understand why Apple brings us back to the dark ages by not supporting bookmarklets on the iPad.

+ Adding bookmarklets on iPad by Chris Bray

I felt honored to interview Twitter expert and Internet investor Jeff Pulver at WebCom Montreal a couple weeks ago (May 2010). Sadly, we lost the live recording signal two minutes before the end. But Jeff gave us enough insight in the 6 minutes we have to provide a unique experience. Hearing Jeff Pulver is fascinating. His keynote session at the first ever WebTweet Montreal was a hit. It included moving and inspiring moments about the power of social media to make the world a better place and to help us achieve our dreams.

We talked about how social media changed the name of the game for brands, how the rules of engagement has changed and that they are never going back. This means, that companies need to adapt to this new reality. For people, social media provides them opportunities to enhance their professional and personal life. Just think about how average persons became influencers.

Jeff is working on a book titled The Connected Me, that I look forward to read. Thank Jeff for a wonderful interview that, I am sure, will inspire and give food for thought to everyone.

Hi, I’m Kim Vallee, the founding editor of At Home with Kim Vallee and CEO of Media Sidekick. I am thrilled to launch the blog of Media Sidekick. This marks the start of a journey where we will explore together the present and the future of social media marketing. We aim to become THE reference in social media marketing on the B2C market.

Together with our Twitter account, this blog will share news and discuss opinions about social media marketing and what it means for bloggers and influencers.

Social media marketing / social advertising are new. We are still defining the rules of engagement. I believe that bloggers should have a say in defining the best practices. To make that happens, I feel that bloggers, PR professionals and B2C brands need a platform where they can bounce off ideas, educate each others on what is important for each parties, and learn from what is going on in the market. We want to do our little part in making that happened. I hope that you will stay tuned and participate in the discussions.

About Media Sidekick

Just a few quick words about us. We are a Montreal-based start up that runs in stealth mode at the moment. We are building Media Sidekick to be a new breed of ad network that goes beyond the traditional banners. We concentrate our efforts around the needs of lifestyle bloggers (design, living, food, hobbies, women and moms).

I’m an also the editor of On the Web with Kim Vallée, which is about social media for bloggers.

+ photo credit: We can do it! poster designed by J.Howard Miller