My boss, the Ma.tt in Matt is keynoting Northern Voice in Vancouver, Saturday February 23th! The title of his talk is “Blogging & Social Media: Where do we go from here?”
Matt Mullenweg Keynoting at Northern Voice!
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Tag Archives: Bloggers
Overwhelm their Fears with Open Source
When in conversations with people championing freedom causes using Google Blogger or Six Apart TypePad, I share that myself and many people find it upsetting that they do so using proprietary software.
The inconvenience and their frustrations with software usually leaves them too afraid to even consider switching to another publishing platform.
It is ok that it isn’t their issue. We all have a limited amount of energy, and relative to other causes open source isn’t urgent.
It is our opportunity, those that are passionate about open source, to provide a solution that is superior. We need to allow those people to see benefits that overwhelm their fears and helps them champion their own causes.
We Raised $29.5 Million!
Matt, now Ma.tt, and Toni have respectively written “Act Two” and “Automattic fundraising” about us, Automattic, raising a $29.5 million USD round of financing today. Our friend Om has a head start on journalistic coverage with “WordPress.com Creator Raises $29.5M“.
By “we” in the title, I mean I have absolutely nothing to do with the financial matters, so don’t ask.
This development is, of course, a little distracting at the moment, but that will quickly fade.
The fundamentals haven’t changed. We have good, popularly, highly regarded solutions to important, interesting problems. There are many challenges we want to continue to refine our solutions to and many areas we have just started to explore — so many things are too hard, and we know we can help. Most importantly we will stay focused on relationships between real people and being dynamic to your needs — which is really what the web and particularly blogging are all about.
I’m as excited to working for Automattic today as the day I started. Has it really only been just over a year? My job description, like all job descriptions, has changed a lot in this short, and I’m sure it will continue to evolve.
I now spend about half my time working with Raanan, Barry, and Michael and the “major media organization, from the NY Times, WSJ, CNN, Fox, Time, People, and more…” the emerging ones like Giga Omni, Gawker Media’s Gizmodo Live, Blog Talk Radio, Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios and I Can Has Cheezburger.
The rest of my time is focused on participating in WordPress.org.
I love the diversity of challenges my roles expose me to. I love that WordPress is a near universal solution for online publishing, empowering the personal publishers and the major media organizations.
But most of all I love the people. Bloggers and open source participants are the among the most wonderful people I have ever met!
But along the way you still have to feel with some stinker technical challenges and personal conflicts, and that is where my favorite Automattic part comes into play. Every member of the Automattic team I learn from every day and every one of them I would love to call friend.
“So we asked some bloggers”
I really enjoyed seeing in 2007 an ever increasing number of people self-identify as bloggers and giving their own meaning to the term. I’m looking forward to even more diverse and expressive uses of blog, blogging, and blogger in 2008.
This is an amazing video put together by rbloggers4peace with bloggers showing their appreciation for Rosie O’ Donnell:
What does the term blogger mean to you?