Sessions at WordCamp San Francisco 2011 on Sunday 14th August

Turns out that the fundamental principles that led to the success of the web will lead you there, too. Drawing on 15 years of web design and development experience, Jeff will take you on a guided tour of what makes things work on this amazing platform we’re all building together. You’ll learn how to stop selling ice, why web browsers work the way they do, and where Rupert Murdoch can put his business model.

What are the 10 things you need to know to become a well-known food blogger? Includes how to write a recipe, how to become part of the community, get comments, take food photos, etc. I will show examples of WordPress food blogs and explain why they succeed.

There’s a lot of amazingness packed into WordPress. Do you know where all the best tools are? This talk is targeted at beginners, but WordPress veterans might just discover a handy trick or two. And hey, you might just find the one thing about WordPress you never knew you always wanted.

The back story of the very-real world application of the WordPress system by a team of photographers, embedded with US Marines in southern Afghanistan.

You can break your WordPress blog in a myriad of interesting and, at times, baffling ways. This talk, aimed at new WordPress users, will cover the top five breakages, showing you not only how to trigger disasters but hopefully also how we can learn from doing so, and piece our blogs back together afterwards too.

The Web has moved past data awareness to social awareness. This started a few years ago but the launch of Google Plus confirms it. When the biggest web company re-orients their businesses to say that “Today’s web is about people. To organize the world’s data, you have to understand people” then you know that even data is telling people who only want to understand data (Google is a pretty algorithmic culture) that we have met the point of it all and it is us: people.

How do people connect best with each other? And why should we have to go to one place where our content and conversation will be owned by one company to do it? In order to have “sites” (which sounds kinda geographic) that work well in a real-time social web, we need to consider creating conditions or being people together: more like hosting a party or conversation. We need open source WordPress to evolve us past where facebook, tumblr and even Google Plus have us. The human skillset or practice of creating engaged conversation or connection is called tummeling. It’s a Yiddish word that describes the job of entertainers hired to get the community involved in the show and have a good time.

Influenced by the web and her community of its earliest makers, innovative comedian Heather Gold began creating a way to involve the “audience” in her shows, scale conversation and hasten intimacy over a decade ago. In this “talk” she’ll show the basic differences between presentation and conversation and the assumptions underneath each. She’ll explore ideas with everyone there about how what we already and and what we’d like to be able to do create connection on our own and our collective space online by delving into what makes that kind of conversation in the physical world. More entertainingly (and usefully) she demonstrates these ideas by creating a great, relevant conversation in the room so that all can feel the difference.

An overview of essential e-commerce concepts with some basic tips for implementing an e-commerce website on WordPress. This talk covers payment gateways, how credit card processing really works, merchant accounts, SSL certificates, PCI compliance, basic WordPress security tips and a very brief review of popular e-commerce solutions for WordPress.

In 2011, SEO is more than just optimizing page titles and a few plugins; it’s about having the right site architecture, social signals, domain authority, site speed and much more.

Sujan speaks on the latest traffic driving tips for your WordPress website including the best plugins for SEO and Social Media. He also will talk about how to implement SEO, such as keyword research, social signals that affect rankings & social media optimization for WordPress. By following his tips, you can turn your WordPress site into a traffic driving machine.

Blogs are not only a place to post your latest news, but they’re an opportunity for you to express yourself, define your unique voice and share your personality with your readers. In this session you’ll learn tips for recording and adding video to your site, the benefits of syndication and distribution, and how to monetize your content and increase sales.