BlogWorldExpo Keynote Matt Mullenweg

This morning’s first session is a keynote from Matt Mullenweg, Wordpress creator. My notes will appear here, refresh the page to see the latest notes:

Opens with a few bad jokes

Matt speaks about his backstory - same thing we have heard 1k times, I am not going to repeat it.

Discusses Automattic - that he was trying to marry fiduciary responsibilities with social responsibilities. Two products Akismet and hosted Wordpress. 18 people on the team, 350 servers, 100 million global uniques in the last month.

How do you stretch 18 people to support that type of site? "a lot of caffeine" - if you are working on an assembly line - the best will have 2-3x productivity. with technology we look for 40x what a normal person would.

You should look for a topic that you find passion around. The key to finding success starts with great, passionate content.

How do social networks and bloggers fit in together? I am on 15 social networks and have crappy profiles on each one. I am never sure whether to friend someone or not. I feel like the best profile of me is my blog. I will go through a person’s blog archives if we are considering hiring them. Blogs need to become a larger part of profile pages.

Where is Wordpress going today? I think on the .org side there are 2 directions - on one hand it’s becoming a platform and where we can add more without making the core heavier is working well. The software is getting lighter but what you can do with it gets more. The soul of wordpress is the publishing and writing on the web and the tools save - but wordpress also sucks - there’s no offline actually, spell check sucks. The comment system is behind.

Companies and Web sites I deal with mostly are like a bad date - they don’t shut up.

Are you actively planning strategies on how to better monetize your products? I am a big believer in creative destruction. Capitalism is a working system. Google makes a lot of money but they also pay out a lot of money (allen: lol yea right). There are ways we could enable users to profit and still keep it users enabled.

Journalists have actual rules, I tend to trust bloggers more. He believes that the sponsored posts could really hurt the industry.

Unfortunately the speaker is out and I can barely make out what he is saying.

Session concluded.