Blog World Expo Archive

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.

Today was the "bonus" day at Blog World Expo. The convention center was very quiet today – I can only guess that many didn’t know about today as the BWE web site shows a start date of Nov 8th. Oh well, more open stalls for me.

I spent the day with the b5media crew – what a great bunch of people. There is a strong family feel to the group. All of the sessions were good and from speaking with the attendees, they obtained good value from each session. I would like to thank Jeremy Wright for giving me the opportunity to speak with him. It was great and I look forward to more speaking gigs in 2008 – would love to do a panel with Marshall and Jeremiah, that’d rock. And Om Malik – I will bring the NY’er out of him!

Tonight was the b5media party at the Luxor – top shelf all the way! Asian place with lots of food options. And I am not naming names but one of the people at my table was able to drink 12 year old rum from Guatemala.

Check out a full recap of the day’s discussions at After the Launch blogger Shama Hyder and About.com blogger Deborah Ng (though she spelled my name wrong!).

Check out my photos on Flickr.

A quick update on this week’s conference coverage. I am here in Las Vegas covering Blog World Expo and PostieCon or IzraCon or WhateverItsCalledNowCon. I’ve got a headcam so you never know what might show up on tape!

Shannon Clark has been reporting on ad:tech in NYC and will continue through the balance of the week.

Rachel Clarke will be covering the Future of Web Design in NYC beginning tomorrow.

Till Klampaeckel is covering the NY Tech Meetup this evening which includes a presentation on Vimeo and Drop.io, two companies we covered in the past week.

Grab the RSS feed and be notified as soon as one of us posts new updates.

I am very excited to announce that my first speaking engagement as part of CenterNetworks will take place at Blog World Expo in Las Vegas next month. We will roll the dice, hit on 17 and light up the nights! I will be speaking with b5media CEO Jeremy Wright on the topic of "Thriving as a b-list blogger". Now I know what you are all thinking, "Allen, you ain’t no b-lister, you are lucky if you are c-list, maybe even d-list!" Don’t worry, we will bring the thunder. I can only tell you this so far, Mr. Miagi might make an appearance.

I am looking forward to seeing everyone in Vegas – you’ve got to attend my session – you never know what I might say :) Check out the full day of education and register for the event. The conference is three days (November 7-9) and is a great bargain with the awesome talent lineup.

Some other notes/questions:

• Anyone up for a blogger dinner in Vegas?
• I will be providing conference coverage for the balance of the conference
• I will be attending and covering Postiecon (the PayPerPost conference) the day after Blog World Expo

Drop me a line if you plan on attending either my session and/or the conference in general.