John Battelles interview with Matt Mullenweg in Austin Texas. The discussion around the topic of Blogging being dead was pretty good. Also interesting is Matts thoughts on scaling advertising. What are your comments on the interview?
Matt Mullenweg Interviewed By KTEH
Matt Mullenweg was recently interviewed by KTEH who produces the program, “This Is Us“. The interview goes over a bunch of information such as Automattic, Matt’s enjoyment of WordCamps, the GPL licensing, and more. This is a great 5 minute spotlight for anyone that is not familiar with Matt. One of the best things he said during this interview was that:
It’s never good to see something you put your heart and soul into, being used for morally odious purposes. But, ultimately, the freedom to use the software for any purpose is far more important than the fact that I might disagree with some folks who use it.
He even talks a little bit about the legal action threat against Chris Pearson earlier this year.
Interview With Two WordCamp Detroit Attendees
During the conference, I randomly pulled two people aside attending the event to get their take on how things were progressing. I wanted to know if they had learned anything new and what they thought of the event overall. The attendees are Rick McGrath and Ana Kelly both whom work for Resonate Web Marketing. During the interview, we get to hear about their experience using WordPress as well as their favorite features of the software.
Interview With Anthony Montalbano
This is an interview with Anthony Montalbano who is one of the main reasons why WordCamp Detroit was able to take place this year, a first for Michigan. In this interview, I ask Anthony what was the largest hurdle he had to jump over in order to make the event a reality. Although the event organizers really wanted to do a WordCamp in the Detroit metro area, it just didn’t come together this year which is why they opted for Novi, Michigan which is a happening place in and of itself. I also asked Anthony to give prospecting WordCamp organizers some tips on putting together a WordCamp of their own.
Interview With Joe Leblanc – Joomla Developer
One of the things I was most interested in doing at OpenCamp was getting an interview with both a representative from the Joomla community as well as the Drupal community to ask them a round of questions specifically to see how their communities have dealt with some of the issues the WordPress community has. Unfortunately, I was not able to obtain an interview with someone from the Drupal community which is understandable considering there was so much going on, it was hard to get a hold of anyone. Fortunately though, I managed to snag Joe Leblanc for 10 minutes to talk about the state of things in the world of Joomla.
About Joe: Joe is a freelance Joomla! developer developer based in the Washington DC area. He’s the author of the book Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development,as well as the video series Joomla! Essential Training at Lynda.com. When he’s not biking, writing, or making a mess in the kitchen, he can be found pontificating at DC PHP Developers Group meetings.
In this interview, I talk to Joe about how the stance on GPL by Joomla almost ripped apart the entire community, his opinion on the positive and negative effects of not having a face to the project, his thoughts on the Open Source Matters foundation and much more.
PluginBuddy Cares
Dustin Bolton, one of the lead developers for PluginBuddy.com goes into detail on their solution to solve the Gulf Oil Spill. Nice to see those guys putting that fancy drawing board in their new office to good use. By the way, I hope that piece of paper didn’t come out of the fax machine like that.
Brad Williams Of WebDevStudios At WordCamp Raleigh
Brad Williams who is the author of the book, Professional WordPress talked about initial sales and the type of feedback he’s received thus far. We also discussed what is going on with the WebDevStudios Crew including information regarding their iPhone application called IPFreely which is a location based application that plots where you pee. Don’t ask me, that’s just what the application does.
Cory Miller Talks Business Via WordCamp Raleigh
Cory Miller who heads up iThemes.com along with PluginBuddy.com gives me the low down on what is going on with the company. Cory gives the details regarding what their newest offering, Plugin Mobile Buddy is all about. It sounds like an awesome plugin and once WPTavern.com goes through a minor redesign, this will be the first plugin I install to provide a mobile version of the site. We also talk about how iThemes tries to take customer feedback to heart by monitoring trends and responding to those trends with awesome products.
Touching Base With Nathan Rice At WordCamp Raleigh
It’s been a long time since I had the chance to talk with Nathan Rice face to face. The last opportunity I had was at WordCamp Dallas in 2008 which was my first WordCamp that I attended. Since that time, Nathan has worked for iThemes, ModThemes, and now resides at StudioPress where he ended up having a strong hand in developing the Genesis Theme. In this interview, I ask him how things are going with his employment at StudioPress. I also have him explain the strengths behind the Genesis theme framework. Last but not least, Nathan describes the features he is most excited for regarding WordPress 3.0
Violet, WordPress 3.0 And Jane Wells
In this special interview with Jane Wells from WordCamp Raleigh, we discuss the prospects of WordPress 3.0. We also have a good discussion revolving the new menu system, including the question I’ve had since Beta 1 and that is, why bother going with Woo Nav if at the end of the day, there is little of Woo Nav to be seen or used? We also talked about the recent promotion assigned to John O’ Nolan who will be Jane’s assistant managing the UI group for WordPress.
The lesson I learned here is to not do an interview with someone against a bright background because as you can see, you end up not seeing the person. In this case, we now can’t debate whether Jane’s hair is Red or Violet. Perhaps we’ll take HairOfJanes word for it.