October 09, 2008

Horse Power 55: Matt Mullenweg, Wordcamp Utah 2008

In this episode of Horsepower I get to talk to a software developer who helped to change the way communication,
interaction and sharing is accomplished over the web. Some might argue that blogging isn’t fundamentally
different now than it was 15 years ago. While you could have built your own blog with html or php,
the cool thing is that I can go to wordpress.com (or blogspot.com, typepad.com or moveabletype.com)
and sign up and get a blog in less time than it takes to pick a title and a tagline. No credit card
necessary.

Though that has been around for a number of years, the impressive thing about wordpress is the open source
model and the cool features and updates that keep coming out, incorporating the best of what the community
comes up with.

The cool thing that open source paradigm allows guy like Mullenweg to do is, exactly what they want to
do, for their own reasons and scope. They innovate in creative ways and create products that inspire
culture, are widely popular, and are in the end profitable for the creators and the community. My own
introduction to blogging came from my love of writing and my need to have a format that would allow me
to think in small chunks. Blogs are fairly freeing. They let you focus on the craft of creating content,
not the grit of navigating the digital landscape. As such, the Wordpress motto, “code is poetry” is both
representative and prophetic. Matt, Joseph and the Wordpress team won’t become the Steve Jobs or Bill
Gates of their generation, because what they created and will create will be as much ours as theirs.
The intellectual property is their vision, and their spirit of cooperation to create community driven
software with the end user in mind. Hope you enjoy the video from Matt’s Keynote Address to the group
and the interesting info below about WordPress…

Interesting wordpress facts:

• blogs get 50 to 60 % of traffic from search
• 11.1 million downloads so far in 2008
• 35million new posts this year on wordpress.com
• 4 million per month
• 6.5 billion pageviews
• 230 million unique visitors
• 5 billion spasm were blocked by Akismet and it is 99.925% accurate.

Top Ten Wordpress Plugins:

• cforms
• wp-polls
• WP automatic upgrade
• wp-cache
• wp-db-backuo
• wp.com stats
• nextgen-gallery
• google sitemap generator
• all in one seo pack
• akismet

Great to meet you Matt and see all my SLC peeps, @libel_vox, @Thomallen, @bradbaldwin, @ashbuckles, @cspencer, @thedruidxpawx, @whyisjake, @lauramoncur & @robertmerrill. -Mike

Posted in Geeky Stuff, Horse Power Podcast, Podcast, Salt Lake City, Social, Uncategorized, Web & SEO