Web Wednesday with Matt Mullenweg

Last night I attended Web Wednesday’s social mixer featuring Matt Mullenweg, the 25-year old founder of WordPress. Blogging is a very social method of communication. One interesting phenomenon that has emerged within the WordPress blogging sphere is a side community Club Penguin members, for exchanging cheats, items and trades. Matt’s team has a  project extending from simple blogging called BuddyPress thats builds a social networking platform on top of WordPress installations. Matt also discussed the direction of moving WordPress from allowing the user to simply be a content producer (writer) to content consumer (reader) by perhaps aggregating feeds onto the WP dashboard.

And what about the microblogging trend popularized by Twitter and Facebook? Does this mean a fundamental shift for the way we produce and consume content? In a way, yes, since many people who have never devoted the time to maintaining a blog can now easily blog short, random thoughts (quite perfect for celebrities, many of whom have jumped on the bandwagon!) News feeds can be updated by the minute, which have some Twitterers replacing their RSS with reading news tweets. That is not to say that blogs are being pushed by the wayside. They are much more rich in content and character still, and embodies the personality of the  writer.

Other interesting ideas Matt discussed was the future of centralizing means of distribution of content over the web.  Now with a slew of social networking applications like Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Tumblr, Delicious, Twitter, just to name a few, in addition to personal blogs, it is quite a hassle to update the same information or post the same content over multiple platforms to reach your different networks. The concept of a “hub press”  will enable users to post and share content across multiple platforms from a central hub.  Ping.fm is one online service that makes it easier to update your social networks from one location. Online articles provide the ability for readers to share them with people in their networks, to the extent that we have so many outlets through which to re-post.

In addition to managing one’s various social networks, it’s also another task to manage one’s identities that vary across networks, not unlike the roles we take on in real life under different social settings. This concept of separating and aggregating profiles is an interesting area of discussion. Ben Metcalfe sums up his article about this topic by stating that although the most logical thing to do would be to centralize all our information and accounts, our social behaviours and they way we interact in social groups is very organic and dynamic -they way we present ourselves changes according to the social context.

{ Tags: community, interaction, social, web, wordpress }
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