10:13AM We’re in a free market, and in a free market the best solutions win.
(Standing Applause)

10:11AM I could spend these 45 minute talking about the social graph but honestly it doesn’t matter in 2 years. What matters is discussing the underlying architecture, and working to improve it.

What if there was a wiki for every bill, and it could be edited by citizens before becoming law?

10:09AM Code isn’t the most needed thing with most software. The problems with most software - design, branding, color, usability. Most enterprise software suffers immensely from these problems.

10:08AM Matt says he didn’t know how to code when he started WordPress, but he learned.

10:07AM “Ask not what your software can do for you”

10:02AM Social Objects - people congregating around social objects: photos, tags, slideshare because they are more useful than things like friend requests.

9:56AM Exhortation #3: Kill the megabrands. The age of portals is over.

9:52AM Exhortation #2: We have to respect other people’s time.

• Ex #1: johnchow.com - he
  showed this blog as an example of a cluttered interface where it’s hard to find the posts.
• Ex. #2: “a once popular internet company”

9:51AM Facebook’s largest strategic error to date: rules too lose for apps has created a mess of spam (like hot potato requests and zombies)

9:47AM Wikipedia - Jan ‘08: 2.1 Million articles. WordPress blogs - creating equivalent of 2 Wikipedias a month.

9:45AM Exhortation #1: Reduce Friction - we need invisible software

9:43AM Form dictates writing - ex. Prologue theme. It mimics twitter, so people write short posts, as they would with twitter.

9:41AM 4. Validation: comments matter a lot to bloggers. It’s how they know they have readers, and interact with their community.

9:39AM 3. Public: Systems that default to being open end up being most successful.

9:37AM 2. Handling Spam: Spammers are the online version of terrorists.

9:34AM 1. Expression: people want their blogs to represent themselves. Presentation tab in WordPress is one of the most important things about it. People can choose or create a theme that makes their online presence their own.

9:33AM 5 years: 7,226,049 downloads. Let’s look at the 4 things most important to blogger:

9:32AM WordPress: way back in 2003 WordPress started as a fork of b2. Able to do this b/c b2 was open source.

9:30AM Blogging and Social Media: Where do we go from here? Almost a decade into blogging, and we’re just at the cusp of where this is all going.

9:29AM Boris introduces Matt Mullenweg!

9:26AM Today’s color is Brown!

9:25AM Boris Mann: Northern Voice is now a registered society in BC! Part of this year’s conference registration fee helped cover expenses for this. Congrats to the organizers - an excellent milestone!