Lorelle actually sent this to me a while ago, but I’ve been backlogged on updating the site — so apologies. That said, we’ve all decided on the keynote topic which will be centered around WordPress Power Blogging Tips. Her talk will focus on the various tools beyond WordPress that work with WordPress that power bloggers use, such as Greasemonkey Scripts, powerful text editors, integrating WordPress into social media and vise versa (posts appear on Twitter and such). It’ll provide a detailed look at what you can do to blog better with WordPress beyond just the WordPress Plugins and Themes, opening up minds to the possibilities.

We’re really excited that Lorelle is coming up from Oregon to attend this event. Her last Twitter message said she was boarding a plane for Las Vegas, where she’s attending WordCamp Las Vegas. Lorelle is practically a legend in the WordPress community, and gave a really amazing talk down at WordCamp San Francisco when I was there last year.

If you haven’t already done so, grab your tickets ASAP. This is the very first WordCamp Whistler, and the speaker list and attendee list (which encompasses several of Canada’s social media elite) are both stellar.

We’re pleased to announce another great WordCamp speaker, Morten Rand-Hendriksen. Morten is an expert in all things WordPress, and will be talking about various ways to use WordPress in alternate configurations.

We’re pleased to have Morten on-board, and are looking forward to his talk.

Here’s a brief BIO for Morten:

Born and raised in Norway, Morten moved to Vancouver in 2002 and founded Pink & Yellow Media – a design company providing services to small business and broadcasters. Since 2007 he has been working almost exclusively with WordPress as the CMS for his client sites and he is currently working on a series of articles as well as a foundation theme (with the humble working title “The God Theme”) to make the process of using WordPress as a CMS available and accessible for people with limited programming skills.

Morten is the author of Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Expression Web 2 in 24 Hours, a regular contributor to the Microsoft Expression Newsletter and a 2009 Microsoft MVP. He writes extensively on WordPress, CSS and Expression Web on his blog Design Is Philosophy (www.designisphilosophy.com).

In this quick episode, Rebecca and I hit the main points about the event as well as give you a sneak peak at the overall schedule for Friday and Saturday. Details are still finalizing, and we will blog and podcast about them once it’s all solid. In the meantime, check out the podcast and tell your WordPress friends to come to Whistler!

(Music in this episode courtesy of Derek Miller)

We are officially taking submissions for speakers, which you can do my clicking the appropriate menu up above. We’re also really happy to announce our first two confirmed speakers.

The first is our keynote speaker, Lorelle Van Fossen. Lorelle is practically a legend in the WordPress community, and recently gave a talk at WordCamp Hawaii. She’ll be down in Vegas right before WordCamp Whistler, but has agreed to make the long trek up North to be the keynote speaker and get in a few runs on the hill.

Also confirmed is everybody’s favourite Buddy, Andy Peatling, who is about to launch the first social networking framework build on top of WordPress-MU, BuddyPress. Andy has been speaking about BuddyPress at various WordCamps over the last year, but this should be the first event where he speaks after it has been released. I spoke with Andy a few days ago, and he said he was looking forward to not just speaking about what BuddyPress “will most likely do”, but what it in fact “can do”. So it should be a great talk.

We’re going to be opening up registration for the event shortly, so stay tuned. Right now we’re targeting about 100 – 150 people for the event. We’re also taking sponsorship, so if you’re a business or individual that wants to contribute to the success, please visit our sponsorship page.