One of the afternoon presenters at WordCamp San Francisco is Scott Porad of Pet Holdings, otherwise known as the LOLcat franchise whose sites get millions of visitors each day.

The focus of his talk is the network of sites that they run which all have the following in common: They’re all humor/entertainment-centric, they’re all hosted on WordPress.com, and they’re all based on user-generated and user-driven content. Continue reading this post ⟩⟩

My first session of the day is with Matt Cutts from Google whose presentation will be “Straight from Google: What You Need to Know”.

Matt says that the number one request he receives or hears is “I want to do better in Google”. He says that WordPress already takes care of 80-90% of your SEO and offers up a few plugins that will help you fight spam and up your SEO. “The beauty of WordPress is that you don’t need to do a lot of stuff.” Continue reading this post ⟩⟩

We’re at the Mission Bay Conference Centre in San Francisco for WordCamp which is a conference and all-out love-fest for WordPress (the platform on which this site runs and on which I’ve based my entire business. I’ve decided I won’t possibly be able to cover everything I’d like to in a timely fashion today so instead of liveblogging sessions I’ll be doing a day blog throughout the day today.

Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com / WordPress) announced that today’s hashtag on Twitter is simply #WordCamp since we’re the only WordCamp happening right now. He began WordPress 6 years ago (when he was 19) and we’ll be having an anniversary party for the platform later tonight.

I’m currently doing a tour at the Genius Bar, which is a help desk for all things WordPress. I’ll be here til 10am with Lloyd Budd (of Automattic) and then Duane, John Biehler, Dale, and John will also have shifts.

Update: I already ran into Mark from Weblog Tools Collection (an amazing WordPress resource online) and look forward to meeting many more cool people.

Update: I’m heading over to live blog Matt Cutts’ talk but will keep this post open to collect all of my thoughts throughout the day.

Update: The BBQ lunch was great and we’re gearing up for Matt Mullenweg’s Q&A session.

Update: I sat in on Scott Porad’s talk as well as one from Cali Lewis. I’m shutting down the Twitter feed now for the rest of the day.

Update: We headed out to the WordPress anniversary party at Automattic’s headquarters where I met some great people including Tara “missrogue” Hunt and Cali Lewis.

Automattic were fantastic hosts, providing free beer/wine, crepes made before your eyes, fresh popcorn, and a delectable selection of desserts (including the WordPress cupcakes). Duane wanted the “Canadians” to represent shut things down so it was a late night but very fun-filled.

This afternoon John and I met up with John Biehler (who is also in town for tomorrow’s WordCamp) and we took a stroll.

Photo credit: John Bollwitt on Flickr

We went from the waterfront up through Chinatown and back down through Union Square. It was really fun to explore a city with such a unique landscape, cultural diversity, distinct architecture and rich history.

San Francisco’s Chinatown is the largest outside of Asia and the oldest in North America, established in the 1850s. Vancouver boasts the second largest Chinatown, after San Francisco.

We arrived in San Francisco yesterday evening and checked into our wonderful boutique Kimpton Hotel (full review will be posted when we’ve checked out).

Since we haven’t had too much time to explore yet, here are some interesting Vancouver/San Francisco history tidbits to kick start the coverage of my trip.