Matt Mullenweg @ HMAUS

Thanks to the Hawaii Macintosh Apple Users group, Matt Mullenweg (aka @photomatt, ma.tt, automattic.com) spoke at their annual event on Saturday, April 26. Of course the discussion was mostly about WordPress and blogging but that is what the 50 or so people, crammed into the lecture room in Krauss Hall @ UH wanted to hear. It's one thing to use Wordpress, it's another thing to hear the founding programmer of one of the most popular platforms in this Web 2.0 world of ours. Matt talked about Wordpress.org for the grow your own types and Wordpress.com for the no-hassle types. He joked in the beginning about how he was going to espouse the merits of MS Vista which got a bunch of laughs from this Mac crowd. What was funny though was his initial attempt to do the preso with his MacBook Air but having to defaulted to his Vista PC when the Air couldn't talk to the projector. Ah, such is life. Matt is a young, energetic and articulate spokesperson. He demoed cool features of WordPress like the Gallery feature which appeals to the photographer in all of us. He also covered projects currently under development at Automattic.com, like monotonedemo.wordpress.com, podcast support, buddypress.com, gravatar, bbpress and others. As typical of talks like this, you leave realizing there is a lot more to this picture than originally thought. I will be spending the next several weeks/months figuring out how to put all of this to use. If you missed the talk mobile lifecaster @Hawaii was there with is portable webcam and archived the entire talk on Ustream.tv. Mahalos again to the folks at HMAUS, Eugene, Terrance and the Wolfman!