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| The revolution and the revolutionaries |
July 6, 2006 |
Matt Mullenweg is a blogging wunderkind, but don’t forget the foot soldiers who really make WordPress shine.
Blogs are perhaps the hottest trend on the Internet, with approximately 75,000 created each day. A driving force behind the blogging phenomenon is Matt Mullenweg’s WordPress, a free blog publishing platform.
Twenty-two-year-old Mullenweg is respected within the online community as a benevolent dictator who oversees the development of WordPress. The system makes it easy to create and write blogs without having to know HTML or other computer programs.
WordPress’ competition includes free products such as MySpace.com and Google’s Blogger.com, alongside fee-based services such as Six Apart’s TypePad and Tucows’ Blogware. While free services deliver few frills, fee-based options offer niceties including statistics packages to slice and dice traffic.
WordPress has tens of thousands of users, including Microsoft evangelist and popular blogger Robert Scoble and actress and talk show hostess Rosie O’Donnell. It has thrived not only because it is free but also thanks to a large community of volunteer developers who contribute new features and fix bugs.
“I don’t know if there is a secret sauce [responsible for WordPress’ success] but the community is very involved in the process,” Mullenweg said during a recent interview at a Toronto-based digital media conference.
There are two flavours of WordPress. One is a free, no-frills hosted version that serves the needs of people who just want an easy way to blog. More sophisticated users can download a version that can be enhanced with dozens of features and plug-ins developed by the WordPress community.
Driving WordPress’ appeal is its grassroots, of-the-people-for-the-people cache.
Freebie model
WordPress proves that collectively-developed open source software is a viable alternative to proprietary software sold by giants like Microsoft. Its success mirrors that of the Firefox browser, which has become a thorn in Microsoft’s side.
Om Malik, who writes a popular technology blog called GigaOm.com, said Mullenweg and WordPress play a unique role because they keep other companies honest by pushing the envelope with new features and services.
“Matt is very responsive, and he’s actually changing the game a little, because other people in the industry are just doing better stuff now because of the existence of WordPress,” Malik said.
Many compare Mullenweg to Linus Torvalds, inventor of the Linux operating system. Linux is an open-source project but Torvalds continues to have the final say on its development.
Malik said Mullenweg is different from Torvalds because Mullenweg did not invent blogging, and WordPress was not among the first publishing tools embraced by bloggers. “The other thing you have to remember is while Matt may be the public face, there are thousands of people who have contributed to WordPress,” Malik said. “He is nothing without them. We forget all the time that Linus started the revolution but you still need the revolutionaries.”
In fact, only five years ago Mullenweg was a high-school student in Houston with dreams of becoming a jazz musician. He got into Web design and computer programming by creating some “terrible” Web sites in exchange for alto-sax lessons. Soon he was developing WordPress, and then his prospects leapt in 2004 when popular tech Web site CNET hired him as a software developer. He was there for only a year before deciding to focus solely on WordPress.
Will the future be free?
The question facing WordPress and Mullenweg is: what now? While WordPress will stay free, Mullenweg has a company called Automattic, a five-person start-up focused on offering value-added services and support for WordPress, as well as other projects.
Automattic has no offices, but employees in California, Texas and Ireland. Mullenweg describes it as a company “throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.”
Among the projects in development is a billing system so Automattic can charge for new value-added WordPress features. “We are sitting on a whole pile of features that we don’t want to turn on until we can charge for them,” he said. Automattic’s portfolio also includes an anti-spam tool called Akismet.
While rivals such as Six Apart have raised millions of dollars in venture capital, Mullenweg had until recently rejected the idea of attracting investors. He has now accepted a small minority investment from several VCs and CNET.
On his blog, Mullenweg said the money will let WordPress “take better advantage of the opportunities before us and allow us to keep our promise to every one of you to maintain a fast, stable and innovative platform in the long term.”
When asked where he expects WordPress to be in five years, Mullenweg gives an answer typical of a 22-year-old.
“Five years ago, I was on my way to being a full-time jazz musician in Houston who tinkered with computers,” he said. “Five years from now, maybe I’ll be a jazz musician again.”
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