Northern Voice: Welcome to Day 2

As everyone slowly trickles in the auditorium for day two and the official ‘conference’ portion of Northern Voice, we prepare for another day of social media geekery.

This morning starts with a keynote from Matt Mullenweg, otherwise known as the father of WordPress and much more. Once again I’ll be semi-live blogging throughout the day, taking notes and following along for those attending, and those absent folks we’re missing.

WordPress has been around for five years (we just passed the anniversary) and was born out of open source platforms, which is essentially key to its growth. “Form dictates blogging”.

To follow along with Matt’s keynote, check out Jay’s live stream.

Matt’s actually got two net peeves, one of which is that it’s WordPress, not WordPress. The other involves his new domain name, oddly enough he’s jockeying for top “Matt” position with Dancing Matt of WhereTheHellIsMatt.com. Side note: his video including Vancouver will be up this summer.

Exhortation #2: Respecting people’s time (spam, ads etc.) now Matt shows an “prime example” of what not to do in this respect and JohnChow.com pops up on the screen. The room erupts in laughter and “oooohs!” as John’s actually from Vancouver and is at this conference. Clearly discerning between content and ads is key.

Just found out via Twitter that someone else is doing a more minute-by-minute live blog of the keynote as well.

Matt’s speaking to unfiltered interactions and comments, “who actually reads the comments on YouTube?” and speaks to the usefulness of their related videos box on the side as opposed to thousands of useless comments. “I would like to add you to my network. Would you like to be my friend.” The social aspect of the internet is now focusing around objects and filtered contents. You now just want to see related content, content from your friends, information you actually want instead of frivolous conversation.

Now he’s speaking to Open Source, and a new set of responsibilities and freedoms. He steals a phrase, “ask not what your software can do for you… but”… you know the rest. The taste of freedom and realizing that software you could pay $5 a month to use is more useful and more applied than enterprise software that costs you or your company thousands of dollars to work with.

We’re into the Q&A portion and a half-hour coffee break then the next block of sessions will begin. Check out WordPressIdeas to contribute to the process. FYI more reasons to like Matt Mullenweg? He created Akismet.