Brainstorm Magazine

Matt Mullenweg adores jazz. Before he became an online legend by founding Word- Press, he used to barter websites for music lessons. Mullenweg’s mind must have been wired to open source by the spontaneously free rhythms of jazz that has its roots in the Atlantic slavery trade circa 1800. Forged in repression, the very essence of jazz speaks to a consciousness that sought to create beauty from tragedy. Despite the fact that this music has morphed into a multitude of genres, it still echoes liberation in its unbounded individualism. There are as many styles of jazz as there are people playing jazz. Small wonder then that Word- Press offers the same freedom of expression.

The numbers get really impressive when you start looking at page views, which grew from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion per month, with 160 global unique visitors per month off big news brand users like CNN, Wall Street Journal, Fox News, Time, BBC and People Magazine. The two key offerings are WordPress.com, which promises to have bloggers up and publishing in fi ve minutes, and WordPress.org, used by the likes of Rosie O’Donnell and the New York Times, which are the big traffi c churners. A fi rm believer that software sales are dead, Mullenweg says revenues for WordPress are derived from upgrades, advertising, VIP hosting and Akismet licences. A vision that is shared by Polaris, Radar, True Ventures and the New York Times Co. who invested $29.5 million in Automattic’s second round of venture capital funding. Automattic is the company behind WordPress. Despite the fi nancial injection, it’s reported that Mullenweg enjoys the same life and still drives around in his old beatup Chevy Lumina. In South Africa recently to speak at WordCamp 2008, in Cape Town, Mullenweg says the popularity of the platform is driven by the fact that the technology is “very powerful, but still friendly.

 

People can do amazing things with it.” In terms of software engineering, Mullenweg walks the talk. “I think it helps when the people developing the software are also users of it. That way, if something doesn’t work, they feel the pain. Beyond that, no magic secrets I know of.” Musical musings Mullenweg was dreaming about being a professional musician when he became interested in blogging. Using open source, he tinkered around and started building blog tools so he could “reach my tribe, and that was really powerful for me as an awkward teenager”. A student of politics and philosophy, Mullenweg dropped out of university at 22 to start Automattic. “I loved writing and photography, and blogging was a way to share that,” he says, adding: “My dream was simply to have better publishing software for my personal site.” It’s probably because WordPress is born out of Mullenweg’s interest in blogging and blog tools that he’s so passionate about the issues citizen journalists face. If you check out the Zeitgeist at Akismet, it’s alarming to see that 87 percent of all comments are spam, and that since it was created, the crunching engine (free for personal use for all blog platforms) had caught 7.4 billion spams at the time of writing. Mullenweg’s visit to the country was pretty low-key. There was none of the normal hype attendant with someone of his infl uence coming to this country.

What’s more interesting is what people were saying about him after they’d met him, or listened to him at WordCamp. They were using words like “wise” and “humble”, which is a departure from the ego one can fi nd when people make it big overnight. One gets the sense that it’s not the destination that Mullenweg thrives on, but rather the journey. When asked how he’ll be celebrating the success of WordPress 2.6, he replies: “By working on 2.7.”