Speakers
WordCamp SF 2009 will feature a wide variety of great speakers presenting on everything from marketing to technology.
Matt Cutts
Matt Cutts is the head of the webspam team at Google where he specializes in search engine optimization (SEO) issues. He is known in the webmaster and SEO community for applying Google’s Quality Guidelines. Before working in the Search Quality group at Google, Matt worked at the ads engineering group and on Google’s SafeSearch. Matt sometimes discusses search issues and offers advice on website visibility in Google on his personal blog at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ or catch him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mattcutts.
Tim Ferriss
Timothy Ferriss, nominated as one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People of 2007,” is an angel investor and author of the #1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek, which has been sold into 35 languages.
He has been featured by more than 100 media outlets, including The New York Times, The Economist, TIME, Forbes, Fortune, CNN, and CBS. He speaks six languages, runs a multinational firm from wireless locations worldwide, and has been a popular guest lecturer at Princeton University since 2003, where he presents entrepreneurship as a tool for ideal lifestyle design and world change.
Tim is an active education activist and has architected experimental social media campaigns such as LitLiberation to out-fundraise traditional media figures like Stephen Colbert 3-to-1 at zero cost, building schools overseas and financing more than 15,000 US students in the process.
Philip Greenspun
Philip Greenspun has been in and around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1979. He alternates between teaching traditional electrical engineering classes and teaching “Software Engineering for Web Applications” (6.171), a course that he co-developed with Hal Abelson. This has been a successful course at MIT and is being used by computer science departments at 20 other universities around the world. Greenspun is the author of two textbooks used at MIT, including Internet Application Workbook (available here).
Greenspun holds an Airline Transport Pilot certificate. He has flown light single-engine aircraft to every corner of the North American continent. Greenspun teaches helicopter and airplane instrument flying at Hanscom Field near Boston.
In the mid-1990s, Greenspun founded the Scalable Systems for Online Communities research group at MIT and spun it out into ArsDigita, which he grew into a profitable $20 million (revenue) open-source enterprise software company. The software is best known for its support of public online communities, such as www.scorecard.org and photo.net, which started as Philip Greenspun’s home page and grew to serve 500,000 users educating each other to become better photographers.
Dave Gray
Dave Gray is the Founder and Chairman of XPLANE, the visual thinking company. Founded in 1993, XPLANE has grown to be the world’s leading consulting and design firm focused on information-driven communications. Dave’s time is spent researching and writing on visual business, as well as speaking, coaching and delivering workshops to corporate clients.
Douglas Hanna
Douglas Hanna is a consultant, blogger, and speaker who specializes in customer service. He writes about customer service and the customer service experience on his blog, Service Untitled. Douglas has helped companies of all sizes improve their customer service since 2004 and has written numerous articles on how and why companies can use customer service as their competitive advantage.
When he isn’t blogging or consulting, Douglas works for Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and Akismet.com, as a “Communications Engineer.” At Automattic, Douglas spends most of his time running the day-to-day operations of the WordPress.org Showcase and helping to support WordPress.com users. When he isn’t doing anything related to work, Douglas enjoys reading and playing the piano and is a diehard Duke Blue Devils fan.
Tara Hunt
Tara ‘miss rogue’ Hunt has spent most of her adult life online, either participating in or building communities. From the first wave of online marketing as it emerged in the late 90’s all the way to being a pioneer of new marketing in Silicon Valley in 2005, leading the wave into Web 2.0: the participatory web.
Tara understands how the the participatory web is changing all of our relationships: B2C, B2B and C2C. She doesn’t believe in pushing messages or creating strong brands, only in the power of building relationships. She co-founded Citizen Agency in 2006 with the mission of teaching her clients how to work more effectively with the communities they serve and how to embrace and adjust to all of the changes in culture businesses are facing. She maintains a popular blog over at HorsePigCow.
Tara wrote a book, The Whuffie Factor, to be available in April of 2009 published by Crown Business (division of Random House). The Whuffie Factor discusses the underlying secret of online communities: success in online communities is about building social capital online.
Cali Lewis
Cali Lewis is the host and producer of GeekBrief.TV, an online news show about technology and consumer electronics. GeekBrief.TV bridges the gap between hard core geeks and people with a casual interest in technology.
GeekBrief.TV is downloaded hundreds of thousands of times each week by viewers from around the world.
Cali makes regular appearances on MSNBC, NBC, ABC and FOX to talk about what’s new and exciting in technology. As a public speaker, Cali talks about the impact of technology that we experience today and amazing research that will become the technology we use in the future. She is also quite fond of bacon.
John Lilly
John Lilly is the CEO of Mozilla Corporation. He joined Mozilla Corporation in 2005 as Vice President of Business Development and also served as COO and a member of the Board of Directors. Prior to this, Lilly was the founder, CEO, CTO and VP of products for Reactivity, a software company acquired by Cisco Systems in 2007. Previously, he held staff positions at Apple, Sun Microsystems and Trilogy Software. Lilly has been an active participant in open source projects, serving on the boards of the Open Source Applications Foundation and Participatory Culture Foundation. As CEO, John focuses on the product, technology and execution of the Mozilla Corporation.
Dave Moyer
Dave is an internet personality in the Denver area, and is the founder and president of Bitwire Media, a digital media company that produces online and offline content on a wide variety of topics. Dave is also the producer and cohost of Bitwire’s popular podcast devoted to WordPress and blogging, WordCast, and covers open source technology for Ars Technica.
Matt Mullenweg
Ann Oyama
Ann Oyama, aka Super Ann, is a technology consultant and web/software developer who sometimes programs custom WordPress themes and plugins for fun and profit. She runs BayAnime.com, the most popular (and only) resource and community site for Bay Area fans of anime, manga, and Japanese pop culture… built entirely on everyone’s favorite platforms, WordPress and bbPress! Ann is otherwise occupied with way too many things including interwebbing, broccoli, beardogs, bands, and taking photos with lots of bokeh. You can read her sporadic blogs about random and often geeky stuffs on her website (perpetually under construction), SuperAnn.com.
Andy Peatling
Chris Pirillo
Chris Pirillo has been participating in Internet conversations since 1992, having launched Lockergnome.com as a content publishing network and building Gnomedex to be one of the blogosphere’s highly regarded conferences. He publishes a personal blog and lifecast to tens of thousands of viewers, and is a top subscribed partner on YouTube. When searching Google for “Chris,” his site is listed as the first result. He’s a monthly columnist for CPU Magazine, and has authored books on business and personal technology. Chris also produces weekly video segments for CNN.com Live, where he offers tech advice to a savvy audience.
Scott Porad
Scott Porad is the Cheezburger Technology Officer of Pet Holdings, Inc., the company behind I Can Has Cheezburger? and Failblog.org. The Cheezburger Network is a collection of web sites where everyday millions of people share moments of joy through the humor and wonder of LOL.
Previously, Scott focused on e-commerce and online retailing at drugstore.com, and online media and content management systems for ESPN.com at Paul Allen’s Starwave. He writes about his experiences working with the Internet at http://scottporad.com.
Outside of work, Scott hangs out at home in Seattle with his wife and two boys where he’s planning to build a treehouse this summer. He’s hopelessly addicted to golf and loves music which he writes about occasionally at http://ineedmoreears.com.
Steve Souders
Steve works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. Prior to that he held the title of Chief Performance Yahoo!. His book, High Performance Web Sites, reached #1 in Amazon’s Computers & Internet category. Steve serves as co-chair of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O’Reilly, and is co-founder of the Firebug Working Group. He taught CS193H High Performance Web Sites at Stanford, and frequently speaks at conferences including OSCON, The Ajax Experience, SXSW, and Web 2.0 Expo. Steve is the creator of YSlow, Cuzillion, Hammerhead, and UA Profiler.