What's best for advertisers on Twitter's platform isn't for there to be 20 different clients.
— Matt Mullenweg
I am an optimist, and I believe that people are inherently good and that if you give everyone a voice and freedom of expression, the truth and the good will outweigh the bad.
Before the widespread rise of the Internet and easy publishing tools, influence was largely in the hands of those who could reach the widest audience, the people with printing presses or access to a wide audience on television or radio, all one-way mediums that concentrated power in the hands of the few.
Environment plays a huge role in my ability to creatively focus and my mood - for better and worse.
If you think of the ideas of open source applied to information in an encyclopedia, you get to Wikipedia - lots and lots of small contributions that bubble up to something that's meaningful.
Why are so many companies stuck in this factory model of working?
Money and salary is not a particularly good motivator in the long term.
In every aspect of life, I consider myself incredibly fortunate.
I'm really good at making software for publishing.
For WordPress to be world class, it needs to have a sustainable model.
While I personally believe strongly in the philosophy and ideology of the Free Software movement, you can't win people over just on philosophy; you have to have a better product, too.
My job is such that I get to run new things every day, and I get to run new markets and new technologies. I enjoy that quite a bit.
Simplicity can have a negative impact when it's the crude reduction of nuances beyond appreciation: a Matisse presented as a 16-color GIF.
Jeffrey Zeldman had an astonishing ability to craft a seductive coolness using educated references, dry humor, and retro/organic imagery.
A lot of the early adoption of WordPress was actually from thousands and millions of individually hosted instances, so a lot of the people who ran WordPress were on their own.
It turns out that social networks drive a heck of a lot of traffic to blogs.
I hope that people have more to say than 140 characters will allow them in their life.
There are 100 million blogs in the world, and it's part of my job as the co-founder of WordPress to help many more people start blogging.
There is no moderator or ombudsman online, and while the transparency of the web usually means that information is self-correcting, we still have to keep in mind the responsibility each of us carries when the power of the press is at our fingertips and in our pockets.
Don't think about work in your bedroom or relaxation area.
Occasionally, if I'm in a rut, I find changing location helps.
Particularly if you're a good engineer, there's a lot of ways you can make money, but to actually have an impact on the world is rare, and when you find an opportunity for that, it's very special.
I don't care what hours you work. I don't care if you sleep late or if you pick a child up from school in the afternoon. It's all about your output.
The beauty of open-source is that you can pick up right where someone left off and start right there.
Sometimes, you have to be frustrated and do something unscalable and a waste of your time to be inspired.
Has anyone ever said, 'I wish I could go to more meetings today'?
The power of the web is not in centralization; it's not in closed systems or anything like that. It's in its open nature, and that's what allowed it to flourish for the first 10 or 15 years.
The more money Automattic makes, the more we invest into Free and Open Source software that belongs to everybody and services to make that software sing.
I learned a ton of things during my time in CNET.
Immunity to obsolescence is the only obsolescent-immune conceit of the past millennium.
I spend a lot of time on forums, and they drive me crazy.
Automattic's mission has always been very aligned with WordPress itself, which is to democratise publishing.
Just because someone uses Twitter doesn't mean they shouldn't use WordPress, and vice versa.
If you're going to quit your job to focus on an idea, you get overly attached to that idea because you had it, and it's the reason you quit your job. Plus, most ideas are bad.
Sometimes you might feel blogs are like TV: You have a thousand channels, but nothing good is on.
Now an audience of more than 1 billion people is only a click away from every voice online, and remarkable stories and content can gain flash audiences as people share via social networks, blogs and e-mail. This radically equalizes the power relationship between, say, a blogger and a multibillion dollar corporation.
I think it's good to have different locations for different modes you want to be in throughout the day, and to keep them separate.
The themes in WordPress drive a lot of design trends. It democratizes design... You make a theme, and suddenly it's on hundreds and thousands of sites.
It seems like the web, particularly software as a service, provides ample opportunities for you to flourish economically, completely aligned with the broader open source community.
When you look at things like Flickr and Youtube, they are specialised blogging systems, so why hasn't blogging encompassed that ease of functionality?
Whenever there's a new form of media, we always think it's going to replace the old thing, and it never does. We still have radio, however long after TV was introduced.
There's something very real about helping someone one-on-one.
Some folks have suggested that, using WordPress, Prologue, and RSS, you could create a pretty effective distributed version of Twitter.
The center of gravity for an organization should be as close to what they make as possible. If you make cars, you need people in the factory. If you breed horses, be in the stable. If you make the Internet, live on the Internet, and use all the freedom and power it gives you.
Twitter is the ultimate service for the mobile age - its simplification and constraint of the publishing medium to 140 characters is perfectly complementary to a mobile experience.
It's good to work for someone else. Because then you appreciate it more when you are an entrepreneur.
Philip Greenspun had a huge impact on me. He was the first person I knew of that embraced online communities, created a real business around open source, gave back to the community through education, and inspired me to explore photography.
If you want to be good at something, you really have to work at it every single day. You have to work hard at the things that are hard. Otherwise you are just treading water.
If you were building a real-time game like one of Zynga's games, the WordPress model wouldn't work well for that.
In my brief sojourn in college, my favorite classes were political science because I loved the idea of systems we can set up that benefit society - rules we can put in place that sometimes you run against, sometimes they're painful, but ultimately they benefit the world.
