In case any of you have been on an extended island vacation over the last month or two, you may not know that the topic everyone is focusing on is SEO and analytics. SEO and analytics was a major focus of the CMS EXPO in Denver.

(Just out of curiosity: how many of you have made a renewed effort to improve your SEO and/or analytics over the past 30-60 days? If you have, please add a note below

More exciting news from the Joomlasphere:  Joomla Milwaukee starts meeting later this month!

The first meeting will be January 29 at 11:45 a.m. at the Milwaukee Research Park.   Sign up online, or send an email to info at joomlamilwaukee.com.

Joomla Milwaukee is putting the finishing touches on their website and it is expected to be launched any day now.

(Do you know about other local Joomla

We had a great December meeting of the Joomla Chicago group. The focus was intellectual property issues, especially how the GPL and Joomla extensions relate to each other.

IP Attorney Bob Brill outlined key concepts. Read about "Intellectual Property of Open Source Software Extensions" on his blog.

Extension developer Mike Carson, of Integrated Technology and Design, related the concepts to

This just in: "Is there a Rocky Mountain Joomla User Group?"

Let's hear it, Rocky Mountain types! (Hey, if you get a group together, I'll sure come out for some meetings -- I had an awesome time out there!

Joe Scarry is head project manager for Chicago Joomla web developer and web design firm Arc Technology Group.

Coming back from the CMS Expo in Denver, one very clear message is that there's an enormous opportunity for communities and neighborhoods and municipalities to use Joomla to communicate their content on the web.

I think this is an especially interesting proposition for the Chicago community -- after all, we are the "City of Neighborhoods."

BTW - Click here for a very cool poster of Chicago

Thanks for the compliments yesterday after the Joomla 101 Basic Training session.  I hope everyone got something out of it.  If you are a member of JoomlaChicago.com, the slides will be online this weekend.  If you want to see Parts 1 and 2, they are also online on the site.  You have to be a registered user to view them.

 For those wanting to see the cycle again, we'll start fresh with Part 1:

I just got back from the CMS EXPO Joomla conference in Denver that ended Friday, and I still can't get over what a great experience it was!

I could go on and on about all my favorite parts -- especially talks by Joomla core team members and tremendous presentations by Joomla experts -- but I'll single out my absolute favorite: meeting people who have just been getting their feet wet with Joomla

Yesterday we installed a trial version of JomSocial on the Arc Technology Group site, and today made it available to a select group of testers (n=25), as the basis for a "Evanston Business & Technology Community."

Initial observations are on my Arc Technology Group blog post.

Joe Scarry is head project manager for Chicago Joomla web developer and web design firm Arc Technology Group.

Andy Angelos gave an eye-opening talk about Web 2.0 and Social Networking to about 50 members of Joomla Chicago yesterday. The word of the day was "conversation" -- as in, "your website and other web communications should be directed at generating conversation with people -- not just talking at them!"

Instead of doing what I usually do -- writing an exhaustive blog post that tries to cover ever

I'm currently in the process of evaluating Azrul's JomSocial extension. Detailed observations are available on my blog on the Arc Technology Group site.

My question for the Joomla Chicago community: what requirements do we envision for a Joomla Chicago social networking functionality, over, say, the next year?

Please leave your comments about Joomla Chicago's social networking needs, or about