WordCamp Seattle is putting on a WordPress Celebration event to allow you and everyone in the Seattle area who loves WordPress to celebrate it together.

This event is for anyone who blogs on WordPress, designs for WordPress, develops WordPress (or its plugins or themes), runs their business and website on WordPress, or loves it for any other reason. If you don’t know what WordPress is or haven’t used it yourself, come anyway and ask other people why they use it and what they think.

The event will take place the evening of Thursday, May 6. Venue details are still being finalized, but we wanted to give you advance notice so you can plan to come. We’re planning to provide food and drinks at the event, a short talk, WordPress site demos, and more importantly a chance for you to meet and mingle.

Hope to see you there! We’ll post on the blog and on Twitter more details as they come. Follow WordCamp Seattle on Twitter here.

The videos in order of appearance at WordCamp:

• Chris Pirillo: Community
• Jane Wells: WordPress Questions
• Aaron Hockley: After Launching a Couple Dozen Blogs
• Scott Porad: WordPress at the Cheezburger Factory
• Mark Jacquith: BuddyPress and the Future of WordPress Plugins
• Martin Buckley: Self-Hosting Multiple WordPress Blogs
• Eric Amundson: 5 Free Ways to Bulletproof your WordPress Site
• Chris Molitor: Finding the Perfect Theme for Your Business
• Donald DeSantis: Create Your Own WordPress Theme
• Mark McLaren: WordPress and the Social Web
• Liz Strauss: Context, Campaigns, and the U Community
• Josh Harrison: wp-config Tips & Tricks

WordCamp Seattle Speaker Mark McLaren

Editor’s Note: Mark McLaren (one of our speakers from WordCamp Seattle 2009) originally posted this to a local email list and gave us permission to republish it here.

I have noticed a number of list members using WordPress.com to host their business blog, and I thought I would offer a few suggestions.

You can continue to host your blog on WordPress.com but use an upgrade (about $10 a year) to map your own subdomain to the site. That way your blog URLs will start with http://blog.yourdomain.com/ rather than http://yourusername.wordpress.com/.

There are lots of reasons to do this, including improved search engine optimization, but the most significant is that if you ever decide to switch to a self-hosted blog, you will be able to change hosts without losing any URLs.

Details for subdomain mapping are here:
http://support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/map-subdomain/

In almost every case, I recommend using a self-hosted installation of WordPress right off the bat. Again, there are many reasons for doing so. One is that, at the very least, it will allow you to place an obvious link to your main website in the navigation of the blog.

Typically, when you host your blog on WordPress.com, there is no easy way to get to the main website from the blog, which is a significant usability and web marketing issue.

First of all, people will be going to the blog from the main site. You want them to be able to get back to the main site without having to think about how to do it.

Second, people will be landing on individual blog posts from many different sources: search engines, links pasted into email messages, other web pages, Twitter, etc. You want them to be able to get to your main website quickly and easily from any page they land on.

Even if your main site runs on .NET, it is still possible to use self-hosted WordPress. Here is an example I built for one of my customers: http://www.photosafaris.com/blog/

(Editor’s note: Thanks for the tips, Mark, and we’d love to hear feedback in the comments!)

DECEMBER 17, 2009 UPDATE:
There are more reasons to choose self-hosted WordPress over WordPress.com.

You can’t install Google Analytics on WordPress.com. If you are going to go to the effort of maintaining a blog, you should track visitors. The analytics that are included in the WordPress.com Dashboard are inadequate.

There are thousands of outstanding plugins and custom themes for WordPress that you cannot use on WordPress.com. The range and depth of plugins and themes is hard to convey in a few sentences. Some plugin examples are the Disqus comments system (shown here on Jeremiah Owyang’s blog) and the Share This plugin. Installing these plugins takes only minutes and significantly increases your blog’s chances of success.