Bay Blogger Thursday

SFist: So when did you start blogging?
Matt Mullenweg: I started an awful blog in 2002 on Movable Type.
Matt Mullenweg: That summer I got a digital camera and "Photo Matt" was borne, I also wanted more control over the software so I switched to b2/cafelog which was written in PHP instead of Perl like MT.
SFist: So when did you decide to start working on your own tool?
Matt Mullenweg: My blog before that summer was fairly boring, after I switched it was still boring but I was in Washington DC for a few weeks so the the pictures were prettier.
Matt Mullenweg: I never had any plans to do a blogging tool, I was fairly happy with b2.
SFist: Well, what's the WordPress genesis myth?
Matt Mullenweg: I wasn't really a coder, my focus was mainly on economics and jazz music.
Matt Mullenweg: The tweaks I started doing were mostly related to the quality of the HTML and the URL structure.
Matt Mullenweg: But hte first code I really contributed was around enhancing the typographic entities in a blog automatically rather than having to spell out the HTML while you were writing.
Matt Mullenweg: That code was integrated with the b2 codebase, life was good.
Matt Mullenweg: What ended up happening was the b2 project stopped development for a long time, more than half a year.
Matt Mullenweg: There were no open source alternatives at the time, so myself and a PHP whiz in England took the codebase and ran with it. That's part of the beauty of Open Source, nothing is ever lost.
SFist: Yeah, interesting that you mention economics and jazz.
SFist: There's certainly an open-source element to jazz compositions.
Matt Mullenweg: Jazz has some interesting constraints to it, and I think the emphasis on the performer rather than the composer has a strong parallel in OS.
SFist: So in Austin you mentioned that your first SXSW helped inspire you. Can you tell us about your experience?
Matt Mullenweg: Sure.
Matt Mullenweg: I was in college and living at home. Completely broke.
Matt Mullenweg: I read that Zeldman was going to be at this thing called South by Southwest. I was astounded someone like that would even be in Texas.
Matt Mullenweg: My sister lives north of Austin in Pflugerville, so I worked it out where I could stay with her and drive 30 minutes to the conference each day and borrowed my parents gas card to drive up there with.
Matt Mullenweg: For the conference itself, even the student fee was high, so I wote a check and overdrew my account to get in.
Matt Mullenweg: Once there I was completely blown away by how accessible all these "web celebrities" were. At a dinner in a little Mexican place I lucked into sitting next to Tantek Celik, Carrie Bickner, and Jeffrey Zeldman.
Matt Mullenweg: I got into a great discussion/argument with Tantek about HTML and he talked about how he thought the rel attribute could be used for extending semantics.
Matt Mullenweg: Later we worked together with Eric Meyer to create XFN, which was, as far as I know, the first Microformat.
Matt Mullenweg: I also met a lot of other great San Francisco folks, which made the move out here a pretty easy transition.
SFist: So besides WordPress, what are you working on these days?
Matt Mullenweg: Well WordPress is definitely a huge chunk of my time, but a lot of it is actually in parts of the project that aren't as visible, for example we have some really exciting infrastructure and web service things coming out soon.
Matt Mullenweg: Ping-O-Matic is a fun project, it currently handles well over two million legit pings per day. I've learned a tremendous amount about scaling applications through it.
Matt Mullenweg: But honestly a lot of my time lately has been spent on music.
Matt Mullenweg: I'm a saxophonist but I recently got a real piano and I've been very happy just trying to learn my way around it.
Matt Mullenweg: Piano has always been really intriguing to me, it has such a rich history and is so logical yet challenging. I was kicked out of piano class in kindergarten and since then I haven't really worked with it much, so it's nice to get better acquianted with it.
SFist: So when are we going to get to catch a performance?
Matt Mullenweg: There aren't any shortcuts in music, it'll be a few years yet before I'll play in public.
SFist: So we know you caught some flack for working with some SEO's. Now that things have died down a bit, can you share some perspective on it?
SFist: How have you guys addressed your funding needs in the meantime?
Matt Mullenweg: It was a pretty painful experience, first realizing how naive and ill-considered what I did was and second seeing it on a t-shirt the next day, as well as on MSN and the Register.
Matt Mullenweg: I covered a lot more out of pocket even then, but since we've really listened to the community and focused on partnerships where people are using and providing WordPress to a larger audience, which has been very fruitful.
Matt Mullenweg: That, combined with the overwhelming show of support from the community immediately following the incident, have set an even stronger foundation for us to build really cool stuff on.
Matt Mullenweg: I'm more optimistic than ever.
SFist: So to get back around to something we mentioned earlier, with your interest in economics, do you think that WordPress and other blog tools are changing some of the business models in the media?
SFist: For instance, being a free download, WordPress really lowers the entry cost of online publishing, which was already lower than the barrier to traditional publishing.
Matt Mullenweg: I don't think anyone would deny that the tools have become more accessible than anyone would have imagined.
Matt Mullenweg: I think it's interesting that the same tools which are enabling a bottom-up personal publishing resurgence are also being embraced by the big players like CNET and Apple.
Matt Mullenweg: I certainly wouldn't want to be an old-school CMS vendor these days.