Matt at WordCamp 2009

Went to the first ever WordCamp Hong Kong today and the highlight for me was certainly hearing from the founding developer of the WordPress platform Matt Mullenweg, which this site – and millions of others – run on.

Affable Matt took the WordCampers, which I’m guessing numbered around maybe 50, on a journey back through time – from how he started working on it and ending off a little into the future – with features request for the next version of WordPress. But there was much more.

It was a thought provoking session for me and here are some quick points that were gleaned from him, which might also spur some of your thoughts.

- Open Source is the future of all software.
- It’s about freedom (to use, share and change software).
- Getting comments on blogs means more than just readership. Readership is what comes with it. Readers could simply be people who show up at your house, drink all your beer and leave.
- The model of everyone going and logging into the same social networking website is “waning a bit”. After all the Internet is about de-centralisation. So maybe that’s where BuddyPress and the like come in – everyone can start their own social network and connect them.
- The future of blogging is multi-modal.

There are lots more little nuggets of stuff which I’ll try to organise and put together a little later, along with more thoughts triggered by the talk from the other folks today.

In any case, here are some of my photos from Wordcamp HK. There are plenty of other (better?) snaps on Flickr. And props to the folks who organised it.

So what about WordCamp Singapore? Firstly, WordCamps are driven by the local community – that means WordPress users in Singapore will need to drive  it (finding a venue, $$$/sponsors etc to help make it happen). Here’s where I think I’d be happy to help make it happen in SG – and I think I’d be able to round up my fellow Techgoondus here to help too.

But I spoke to Maya – “Anti-Chaos Engineer” and one of the key folks at Automattic who help make the WordCamps happen – and it seems like they’ve done quite a few locations in Asia this year (Thailand, Indonesia, China, Hong Kong and coming up, Japan) so unfortunately it seems there aren’t any plans to be back in this part of the world, at least for the rest of this year.

Nonetheless, do you guys want to see a WordCamp Singapore? Shout and leave a comment below. Maybe if there’s enough of you, Matt might find a reason drop by.