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Interview with Matt Mullenweg on WordPress:

Many of the plugin authors I have spoken with throughout the community tell me that very rarely do they ever get a donation let alone a Thank You for releasing their work to the public. Based on the plugin authors feedback, end users demand more features, demand better support, and in the end, have this feeling of entitlement even if the plugin is available without a price tag. The reality is, that for a freely available plugin, you’re not entitled to anything. I don’t know about you, but I certainly would not like to be part of a community that is known as thankless.

On the Internet, the marketing is based on a dual approach:

1. Give something away (e.g., WordPress plugins) to get free publicity that is plain about what exactly is your expertise;
2. Sell something else (at a high price) to a small part of your community or to some business people who are influenced by your community.

Most of the WordPress plugin end-users do participate in e-commerce purchases over the Web. They are used to manipulate payment systems (e.g., PayPal). The tough task is to give them a reason to buy or to give them the envy to recommend you to some business people in need. Just asking for donations does not make it. Do business the Trent Reznor way, folks. Sell T-shirts or mugs with creative WordPress (plugin) art. Or better: Sell WordPress development services.

The WordPress community should quit whining and start building the foundations of a sustainable business platform that will compensate the hard work that the WordPress plugin and theme authors are injecting into the system. One idea would be to have more prominent publicity for the plugin author business on each plugin page. If one WordPress plugin is downloaded 10,000 times a week, that is free access to 10,000 influencers, and I bet at least one of them has a web project (or know one) in need of a good WordPress expert. Do sell this expertise.

Matt, please, help them selling that expertise. There is money to be made here —if only we can do it the right way.

ADDENDUM:

Recommended reading:

- FREE, by Chris Anderson

- TechDirt, by Michael Masnick

Software Powering Midas Oracle

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Database And Blogging Software

- MySQL

- phpMyAdmin

- WordPress – (Documentation – by Matt Mullenweg et al.)

- TinyMCE

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WordPress Theme

- Fall Season

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WordPress Plugins & Widgets

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Plugin Stats

[stats_pluginsused]

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Active Plugins

[active_pluginsused]

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Inactive Plugins

[inactive_pluginsused]

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Midas Oracle Contents

- Midas Oracle Site Search

- Midas Oracle Site Map

- Midas Oracle Pages

- Midas Oracle Archives

- Best External Web Links + Best Midas Oracle Posts

- Explainer + Probabilistic Predictions

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About Midas Oracle

- About Midas Oracle .ORG

- Mission, Boards And Projects

- The Blog Authors

- Terms Of Use

- Contact

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1. Just updated to WordPress 2.5. (See a screencast here.)
2. I waited one week before upgrading, so as to take the time to monitor the WP 2.5 compatibility with our plugins.
3. To upgrade, I used the “WordPress Automatic Upgrade” plugin. The automatic process failed, but the step-by-step process worked fine. Overall, I’m happy. This plugin is a time saver.
4. WordPress 2.5.1 is due for May 2008. In the meantime, if you spot some gremlins, let me know.
5. Speaking of gremlins, WP 2.5 has now a better compatibility with Safari, so maybe Tom W. Bell will come down here to tell us what he thinks of the new US anti-gambling regulations.
6. The Midas Oracle post/page authors will spot a totally reconfigured “Write Post / Page” area.
7. They have added a bunch of “media buttons” (to insert pictures, sounds, videos, etc.) and an “embedded media” button (which you’ll find if you click first on the “Kitchen Sink”). I have yet to fully experiment all that.
8. There is now a “full screen mode” for the writing area.
9. They have hidden the 2 blockquotes button under the “Kitchen Sink” sub-menu.

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UPDATE: Gartner is out today saying that open-source software will take over the free world, eventually —and that includes Chapman University and Tom W. Bell…

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Matt Mullenweg

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Matt Mullenweg has a post out comparing the 2 platforms and touting WordPress.

[...] WordPress is 100% open source, GPL. All plugins in the official directory are GPL or compatible, 100% open source. [...] WordPress MU is 100% open source, GPL, and if you wanted you could take it and build your own hosted platform like WordPress.com, like edublogs.org has with over 100,000 blogs. [...]

I have read with fascination all the comments there, on the original MT blog post, and else. I have spotted many webmasters explaining why and how they moved from MovableType to WordPress —but I have spotted none explaining why and how they moved from WordPress to MovableType.

Interview – MP4 file

Pay attention about what he says on giving away things (free software) and how to monetize that. This 24-year-old CEO is a wise man.

Technical Note: You will hear Matt talking about “WordPress.com” and “WordPress.org”. For your information, Midas Oracle is powered by the blogging software provided by “WordPress.org”.

Pictured above is Matt Mullenweg (the co-founder of WordPress), holding a Crunchie award (designed after a famous scene in Stanley Kubrick’s movie, Space Odyssey). WordPress is now used to power the blogs of many mainstream media (NY Times, WSJ, CNN, Fox, Time and People). The New York Times even invested in the WordPress company, Automattic. (Here’s the article about it in the New York Times.)

In the field of prediction markets, WordPress powers Midas Oracle, the HubDub blog, the (temporarily off) Consensus Point blog, the NewsFutures blog, Jed Christiansen’s blog, Justin Wolfer’s Freakonomics co-blog, the (anemic) Xpree blog, Andrew “Bert” Black’s blog, Mike Smithson’s blog, David Pennock’s (almost abandoned) blog, the (terminated) Yootles blog, the (non-updated) WSX blog, the UsableMarkets blog, the AskMarkets blog, and maybe later the blog from another software vendor.

And you wont be surprised ( ) to hear that the BetFair blog is not powered by WordPress —but by MovableType.

UPDATE: And WordPress is the most popular CMS among the Top-100 blogs.

He told his father he wanted to be a sculptor [in] Paris. His father told him that for every year he went to MIT he would pay for a matching year in Paris when he finished. It was very clever. [...]

= Nicholas Negroponte‘s dad.

 

In the Beginning

We’re a mere hours away from the beginning of Entertainment Gathering 2007, so now is as good a time as any to kick off coverage here with an introduction.

The goal of this blog is to document the conference for posterity, providing a glimpse for the people not able to attend and color for those who are there. I’ll be the one typing furiously on a laptop in the back or hopping around taking pictures. Murphy-willing, most summaries should be up within a few minutes of the conclusion of a talk, so it’ll be as close to live-blogging as I can do while still maintaining some semblance of the English language. When I have time, I’ll try to be concise.

My name is Matt Mullenweg. This will be my first time at EG, or any entertainment conference for that matter. My focus for the last fifth of my life has been the intersection of technology and media, particularly with regards to publishing. Four years ago in Texas I started hacking on Open Source publishing/blogging software called WordPress. Three years ago I moved to San Francisco to work for an internet company. Two years ago I founded a company to focus on WordPress full-time, and it’s been downhill from there. My time these days is centered mostly around WordPress.com, which has grown in the past 2 years to one of the top 15 sites on the web. If you have any questions about blogging or just need general tech support during the event, let me know.

If you’d like to contribute to the blog or chat for any reason, drop me an email — []. I’m looking forward to meeting, chatting with, and blogging about as many of the presentors and attendees as possible, so don’t be shy.

by Matt