Matt Mullenweg, founder of the world’s most popular blogging platform, WordPress, was barely 25 himself when listed by Business Week as one of the internet’s 25 most influential people.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg

WordPress was launched in 2002 and now boasts millions of users and visitors to its free blogging hub at wordpress.com and associated forums for self-hosted blogs at wordpress.org. It is in practice an online democracy that values invention and creativity above traffic and the myth of the zillions of dollars that might have been made online in the reckless 1990s.

Matt’s philosopy is that the web can always be better than it already is, and he is constantly working to make that point, leading by example in attending WordCamps around the world to promote a socially responsible form of blogging.

When Matt first opened a vein to the world as a blogger in 2001, he was determined to develop a free, open source software platform to produce and share his own web tools. He set up his own company, Automattic, to give bloggers control over the design and functionality of their sites that had previously been lacking.

Such was the demand for dynamic, creative and affordable applications that by its fifth year, WordPress boasted a total of 103 million visitors, outstripping its nearest rival Typepad with 20 million.

I should explain that this blog is maintained with WordPress at its core, together with a range of add-ons or plugins, all produced by independent developers united by the same open source ethos. My site is typical of those that begin life as a basic internet presence thanks to the free hosting service at wordpress.com. I decided it was worth pursuing and opted for self-hosting under my own domain with development made possible via the wordpress.org open source blog developers community.

If I have a software problem or query, or require an opinion about the content of my blog, I can get feedback from other users who can see the benefit of blogging as a shared experience.

I’d been considering some of Matt’s reported comments about developing a blogging service that allows the user to spend fewer hours with their knees under a computer desk, adapting instead to whatever mobile social networking technology is freely available, when I witnessed the proof of his vision.

If you don’t believe how interconnected WordPress really is, I must tell you a weird story. I signed into the admin area of this blog earlier today to carry out some basic housekeeping and to access the latest WordPress development news, when none other than Matt Mullenweg appeared to be sitting right across the street from me! I received a link to a video interview with Matt during a visit to Argentina, curiously sitting within a stone’s throw of my old apartment… small world indeed!

The place chosen by newspaper La Nacion for Matt’s interview (in English) would appear to be El Federal, a traditional cafe-bar in the Buenos Aires neighbourhood of San Telmo which is characterised by its bohemian melancholia and a popular expression of tango at weekends.

Incidentally, if you return to my blog you might encounter a gallery of my photos  of Buenos Aires. It’s one of those bloggable spaces that are a great favourite among world travellers, and I promise to share my pics when time and space permit.

Open source

Matt’s arrival in Buenos Aires coincided with a WordCamp event for WordPress developers. He has repeatedly travelled to countries including Canada, China, the Phillipines and South Africa to promote the open source ethos and share news of the continuing work of his company Automattic in improving the blogging experience.

Interestingly, his career background is not in computer science but in music and design, and I guess he retains some feeling for the real world and how people can better interact.

“I like to compare software with music,” he says. “When you make music you base yourself in centuries of development, innovation and knowledge of earlier music, and all of that is something open, that you can use freely.”

Tags: Argentina, Buenos Aires, Matt Mullenweg, open source, WordPress
Categories: blogging

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2010 at 1.00 am and is filed under blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.