Featuring: Michael Adams, Ryan Boren, Mark Jaquith, Andy Skelton, et al! I don’t know much, but Lorna will hook me up!

I don’t know much about this, because I left when it just started! I will give you some notes from Lorna!

We all have ideas about the design and usability of WordPress, but what about when actual testing gets applied to the problem.

Liz has been working extensively on the information architecture and usability of WordPress as part of the inimitable Happy Cog, and here she will share what she has learned and where we need to go.

Session Leader: Liz Danzico

WordPress blog: Bobulate

Liz, pictured on left, is part information architect, part usability analyst, and part editor. As an independent information architecture consultant, she traces the roots of her craft back to her parents. According to Liz, “Growing up at least a little information architect in Northeastern Pennsylvania gave me an organizational advantage over my friends.”

Very few of the things WordPress does are actually new, most has its roots further back than we may imagine. Few people have the perspective on the web that Dave Winer do, and in this keynote he’s going to share with the WP community the history and responsibilities of a web publishing platform.

Session Leader: Dave Winer

WordPress blog: Scripting Annex, a mirror of scripting.com

“I’ve been a blogger as long as there’s been such a thing, starting in 1996 with a blog around a project I was doing at HotWired, where I was a contributing editor.

“I’ve been credited with developing or co-developing many popular Internet technologies, including RSS, OPML, XML-RPC, SOAP. I’ve been a software developer since the mid-late 70s, having worked on outliners, presentations software, scripting, content management and blogging tools.

“I’ve been a lead developer, company executive, board member, investor, editor, research fellow and blogger.”

Traditionally design has focused on the individual, emphasizing usability, findability etc. As the web becomes a social sphere for more people, designing for sociability becomes important. Rashmi will talk about the design of next generation social networks and the sharing of digital objects such as videos, photos, slides, bookmarks, and film reviews.

She will describe principles for the design of such systems, such as serving the individuals goal, creating a symbiotic relationship between the personal and the social; designing to support self-expression and emergent behavior. She will describe how these principles were used in the design of SlideShare and how you can design your own social sharing system.

Session Leader: Rashmi Sinha

WordPress blog: Uzanto; other: Personal blog

Rashmi Sinha is a designer and entrepreneur. She is the co-founder of SlideShare, the largest community for sharing presentations.

In 2002, she co-founded Uzanto, a user experience consultancy that created MindCanvas – a game-like software for customer research. Her next venture SlideShare (launched Oct 2006) is growing fast, letting people share and find presentations on almost any topic under the sun.

Rashmi has a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Brown University. She blogs about the social web at http://www.rashmisinha.com. She also co-chairs the monthly BayCHI talk series.

The slide show that Rashmi did, will be up on my site later on!

Jeremy Zilar will be presenting the next session at Word Camp 2007!

What do you do when your blog goes from a thousand pageviews a day to a million?

Barry and Matt have worked with some of the most popular blogs in the world, and they know what it takes to make them hum. In the first part Matt will talk about HyperDB, the database class that is the magic behind WordPress.com, and how you can use it for your own sites. In the second part Barry will look at some real-world performance benchmarks of WP and some best practices on the systems level.

Session Leader: Barry Abrahamson

WordPress blog: Barry on WordPress

Bio coming soon.

Session Leader: Matt Mullenweg

WordPress blogs: Photo Matt, Matt on WordPress

Bio coming soon.