Howdy and bonjour! First, thank you so much, merci beaucoup, for having me at your WordCamp. I love the spirit of local communities gathering and helping each other learn and grow together. I wasn’t actually planning to speak or even do a Q & A; I was just going to attend this WordCamp. But since the organizers have given me a bit of your time, I will try to make the best of it. 

I love Canada. I first came here for the Northern Voice conference in 2006. Was anyone at that one? I think Dave Winer was actually there. It was a pretty awesome one. What’s that?

[Here I think Dave said he wasn’t at that one, but a different conference, but can’t remember.]

Well, that’s why we blog. My memory is not that good. [laughs] By the way, I think this week is your anniversary, right? 

Dave Winer: It was actually a couple of weeks ago—31 years.

MM: Oh, wow. Thirty-one years. Round of applause! I think why I thought it was your anniversary is that on my blog’s related posts, it showed a post from 2014 that was congratulating you on your 20th because I think The Register or someone did a nice article. 

So yeah, I’ve since been back dozens of times, including several summers in Montreal, at the jazz festival there—they also do Le Festival Haïti en Folie, and Just For Laughs—and a few times here in Ottawa, where I’m on the board of a cybersecurity company called Field Effect. We might even have some Field Effect people here—oh, hi! Thanks for coming. 

Let me give a little update on what I’ve been up to. My life’s mission is to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging. So I have some projects in each of those areas. In publishing, my main work is WordPress, the core software available to everyone. We host it on WordPress.com and Pressable, and allow others to host it with WP Cloud—a cool product—and we use Jetpack to bring all the best cloud features to every WordPress, wherever it is running. And, of course, running the main community hubs at WordPress.org, WordPress.tv, WordCamps, WordPress.net, which probably some of y’all haven’t heard of, et cetera, et cetera. 

On the social side of publishing, I have Tumblr, which is a microblogging social network, but right now it’s on a different technical stack. I need to switch it over to WordPress, but it’s a big lift. It’s over 500 million blogs, actually, and as a business, it’s costing so much more to run than it generates in revenue. We’ve had to prioritize other projects to make it sustainable. It’s probably my biggest failure or missed opportunity right now, but we’re still working on it. 

I’m really excited about the personal publishing side of our products: Day One and WordPress.com Studio and WordPress Playground. Day One is a fully encrypted, shared, and synchronized blogging and journaling app that runs on every device and on the web. You can also have shared encrypted journals with others. It uses the same encryption as one password. It’s the first place I go to draft an idea—for example, to write this talk. Its editor is not as good as Gutenberg yet, but it’s pretty decent at allowing multimodal input—which means you can record voice notes, draw things, etc.—and capturing it all. It’s mostly replaced Evernote, Simplenote, and even private P2s for me. It has some fun features, like when you make a new entry it records, the location, what music you’re listening to on Apple Music, how many steps you’ve taken, the weather. Honestly, some features that would be nice to get into WordPress, at least as a plugin. Right now, I just copy and paste it in the WC admin or the Jetpack app if I want to publish something; that could also be made smoother in the future. 

So WordPress.com Studio is built on an open source project called Playground that we created to allow you to spin up WordPress in a WASM container in about 30 seconds, right inside your browser. Who’s tried Playground or Studio? It’s kind of wild, right? You know how hard it’s been to set up servers and databases and everything like that, and so to see a WordPress virtual machine spin up in like 30 seconds just blows my mind. There’s so much you can do with it. It’s the most sci-fi thing happening inside of WordPress right now, and we’ve just barely begun to take advantage of the massive technical and architectural shift it allows. For example, my colleague Ella builds an iOS app called Blocknotes. It’s a lot like Simplenote, but it uses a Gutenberg editor, and it’s entirely a WordPress playground instance—the entire iOS app. 

Part of the evolution of WordPress has been going from a blogging system to a CMS to a full development platform. So what Dave talked about yesterday, and now that you can build entire mobile apps—which, by the way, can run on every platform, cross-platform, and run the same thing on the web—it’s kind of like a promise from back in the day of Java or other things, React, Native. It’s now very possible with this WordPress WASM stuff. WASM stands for web assembly. 

The main distractions and things holding back WordPress right now are the legal attacks from WP Engine and Silver Lake—I  can’t comment on that, but stay tuned for some major updates soon. 

I forgot to put this in my post—WooCommerce! On the commerce side, there’s, of course, WooCommerce, which is very, very exciting. You can think of it like an open-source Shopify, our enablers here in Ottawa. It now processes over $30 billion of GMV (gross merchant volume) per year, and you can customize it to do pretty much anything: subscriptions, digital, physical goods, everything. And of course, it’s fully open source and built on WordPress. It’s actually a WordPress plugin, so pretty exciting. WooCommerce is now on about 8% of all websites in the world—WordPress is 40, so it’s running on about a quarter of all WordPress sites. It’s been a big part of the growth of WordPress, actually, the past few years. 

In messaging, we have this product called Beeper. Anyone tried out Beeper yet? We got a Beeper super-user here, actually, in Robert. So Beeper basically takes all the different messaging apps—WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram DMs, LinkedIn DMs, did you ever check those?—and it brings it all into one app, one interface, kind of like a Superhuman for messaging, and gives you cool features across all of them. Now this is obviously a pretty hard technical challenge, because we have to reverse engineer all the different networks for everything. But check it out, it’s a pretty fun little app. It’s, free for up to a couple accounts, and paid after that. 

There’s also an open source component of that as well. We’re going to make it easier for people to build bridges and connections to different networks, because there’s a lot that we don’t support yet that we get demand for, like KakaoTalk in Asia. People also want to do dating apps, which I guess have messaging platforms. So it’d be pretty fun to have everything all in one. 

I’ve been in the public a lot, doing lots of talks and actually blogging every single day now for 28 days, which will be 29 when we all hit the publish button at the end of this! So I’ve been blogging a lot. It’s a lot to keep up with. Actually been going every day since WordCamp US, with one missed day in there. I got very, very inspired at WordCamp US. It was a fantastic event. I got to hang out a lot and go to a bunch of sessions, and it inspired me to blog a lot more. If you run Jetpack, there’s actually a pretty cool feature where the notifications will tell you what kind of streak you’re on. So whenever I post, I get this nice little notification, like 28 days. And it has little easter eggs when you get certain number of days in a row, which is fun. So I’m gonna have to add some of this to the post later—I riffed a little bit. We’ll get the recording. So now that this is all done, we can push the publish button together. 

This is a cool device called a Daylight computer. So cool. It’s from a startup I’m invested in through Audrey Capital and Automattic. Think of it like a cross between a Kindle and an iPad. It works in the daylight, hence the name—it doesn’t emit any blue light. It’s great for kids. You can order it on DaylightComputer.com. It runs Android, so it’s super hackable. You can have apps like Beeper, Day One, WordPress, Jetpack, WooCommerce on it. Very, very neat device. I actually have WP Admin loaded right here; you can see you can scroll like super, super fast. Soon the wifi is going to work—it’s a wifi-only device. 

Later I’ll update this post with an mp3 recording enclosed an RSS in honor of Dave Winer, who spoke here, who invented podcasting and RSS. And actually, if you go way back in my RSS feeds, I have some mp3 enclosures from 2004 and 2005, some very funny early podcasts. Also, whenever they post this video to WordPress TV or YouTube, I’ll share that too, and I’ll add some links. Thank you. Merci beaucoup! If you want to follow more. Please check out my blog at ma.tt. No WWW, no .com. Just ma.tt. I cross post to ma.tt on Bluesky and Mastodon and on Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter/X at @photomatt. 

And now we’re going to push the button together. Y’all ready? Murphy willing, are you ready to publish? think I need to add a category and stuff, but I’ll do that later.