Matt: WordCamp Canada
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 planning to speak; I was just going to attend this WordCamp, but since the organizers have given me a bit of your time, I’ll try to make the best of it.
I love Canada, I first came here for the Northern Voices conference in 2006 in Vancouver, and have since been back dozens of times, including spending several summers in Montreal at the jazz festival there, and a few times here to Ottawa where I’m on the board of a cybersecurity company called Field Effect.
Let me give a little update on what I’ve been up to. My life mission is to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging, so I have some projects in each of those areas. In publishing my main work is in WordPress, the core software available to everyone, hosting it on WP.com, Pressable, allowing others to host it with WP.cloud, and using a Jetpack to bring all the best cloud features to every WordPress wherever it’s running, and of course running the main community hubs at WordPress.org, WordPress.tv, WordCamps, WordPress.net, etc.
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 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 still working on it.
I’m really excited about the personal publishing side of our products Day One and WP.com Studio. Day One is a fully encrypted synchronized blogging and journaling app, that runs on every device and the web, and you can have shared journals with others. It’s the first place I go to draft an idea, or for example, to write this talk. Its editor isn’t as good as Gutenberg yet, but it’s pretty decent at allowing multimodal input and capturing it all. It’s mostly replaced Evernote, Simplenote, even private p2s and such 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, the steps you’ve taken, the weather, honestly some features it would be nice to get in WordPress. Right now I just copy and paste into WP-admin or the Jetpack app if I want to publish something, but that could be made smoother in the future.
WP.com Studio builds on an open source project called Playground we created which allows you to spin up WordPress is a WASM container in about 30 seconds inside your browser. You can do so much 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 built an iOS app called Blocknotes that is a lot like Simplenote, but uses the Gutenberg editor and actually is entirely WordPress Playground, just with a custom admin theme.
The main distraction and thing holding WordPress back are the legal attacks from WP Engine and Silver Lake. I can’t really comment on that right now, but will say to stay tuned for some major updates soon.
I’ve been in the public a lot, and blogging every day now for 28 days, will be 29 when we all hit publish together at the end of this.
Now that this is done we can all push the publish button together. This is called a Daylight Computer, it’s a cool new device from a startup that I’m an investor in through Audrey and Automattic. It’s like a cross between a Kindle and an iPad, works in the daylight, hence the name, doesn’t emit any blue light, is great for kids, you can order on daylightcomputer.com. It runs Android and is super hackable so you can have apps like Beeper, Day One, WordPress, and Jetpack on it.
Later I’ll update the post with a MP3 recording, enclosed in the RSS in honor of Dave Winer who spoke here and invented podcasting and RSS, and whenever they post the video to WordPress.TV or YouTube I’ll share that too. I’ll also add some links.
Thank you all, if you want to more please follow my blog at ma.tt, I cross-post to ma.tt and Mastodon, on Tumblr, instagram, and Twitter/X as @photomatt. Now let’s open it up for some questions!
