Not that long ago, Matt Mullenweg, a founding developer of WordPress, and Anil Dash, once chief evangelist of Six Apart and Movable Type, were publicly feuding over open source and the relative merits of their respective blogging platforms. But that’s another country. Six Apart was acquired by Say Media and Movable Type is under control of a Japanese firm while WordPress continues to grow and evolve with its parent firm Automattic. As for Mullenweg and Dash, now cofounder of consultancy Activate, and CEO of start-up ThinkUp, the two got together on stage at The TimesCenter during our paidContent 2012″>paidContent 2012 for an informative interview — and then went out to lunch. (Unfortunately, we couldn’t mike the lunch.)
A couple of highlights from the interview:
Blogging has been declared dead at least five times. But that’s like saying creativity is dead, or personal expresion is dead. Ultimately some percentage of the people who get a taste for it through Facebook and Twitter want their own space. And for the most part, that’s a blog.
And from the avid photographer who goes by @photomatt in his social media life:
One of the things I’ve been working on for the past few months is a radical simplification of the interface. WordPress, it’s a complex tool, it’s like the back of a digital SLR … but that doesn’t work on a phone.
Here’s the full 20-minute video:
Watch this video for free on GigaOM
And here’s Mullenweg’s take.
Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.
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