Matt Mullenweg on the state of WordPress

Matt Mullenweg on the state of WordPress from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

At WordCamp San Francisco a few weeks ago, I managed to get a few minutes alone with Matt Mullwenweg, co-founder, chief coder and “Head of Bug Creation” for WordPress. (I self-host Socialbrite and Socialmedia.biz with code from WordPress.org; others use WordPress.com to host their blog.)

In this 5 1/2-minute video interview, Matt discusses the state of WordPress, its astonishing growth here and abroad, the vibrancy of the consumer open source movement and his estimate that about  8,000 coders are contributing code and themes to WordPress today. The recent release of WordPress 2.8.4 (fixing a security hole) makes WordPress, in my view, the best blogging software on the planet (with apologies to newcomer Posterous).

A few highlights from our conversation:

• Matt: “Some people think blogging is slowing down, but from everything we’ve seen, it seems blogging is accelerating just as fast as ever. ”

• Matt: “There’s no real killer feature in software anymore. There are 50 killer features, and everyone has a different 50.”

• WordPress fits into the consumer wave of open source tools. the first wave was purely development tools, the second was infrastructure and the third is consumer” applications like Firefox and Azureus.

• Why are there an estimated 8,000 coders contributing code and themes to WordPress? “WordPress belongs to everybody. Everybody owns WordPress,” Matt says.

• What has surprised him most about WordPress? “Internationalization,” he says. Some 42% of WordPress’s downloads come from overseas, compared with 27% last year. “People abroad are taking the code, adapting it, customizing it and making it their own and taking it to a new level.”

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo

The first WordCamp was held in San Francisco three years ago, and since then dozens of WordCamps have sprung up around the world, from Vancouver to Dallas to Milan, Italy. It’s an amazing thing to watch and to be a part of. (Socialbrite and its developer have contributed a Creative Commons plug-in to the WordPress community.)JD Lasica, founder and former editor of Socialbrite, is co-founder of Cruiseable. Contact JD or follow him on Twitter or Google Plus.