At WordCamp Europe 2017, Matt Mullenweg was interviewed by Om Malik, followed by a Q&A with the WordCamp visitors. They extensively discussed the open web, the WordPress editor ‘Gutenberg’ and WordPress’s future as an operating system for the independent web, among other gems like Matt’s take on ethics in acquisitions in the world of open-source.
Matt Mullenweg, Interview by interview by Om Malik, followed by a Q&A at WordCamp Europe 2017.
In this fully searchable transcript, I highlighted my favorite insights and quotes, and I added a table of contents to improve your user experience. Here you go:
In 1997, at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC 1997), Steve Jobs did a legendary Q&A. It gives valuable insights into both Apple, as in the art of marketing and development as a whole. I improved and fine-tuned this transcript and added a table of content to make the many valuable quotes searchable and easy to navigate through. Enjoy!
Block.One is a leader in the blockchain industry. Brendan Blumer is its CEO, and Dan Larimer its CTO. On June 1st, 2019, they announced Voice.com, the blockchain-based social media platform they’re building. As Brendan stated: Social media has not been a good friend to us. It was designed to use its users.
They also revealed the first Voice.com marketing message:
Unfriend bots;
Unlike shady algorithms;
Unfollow being followed;
Voice.
Like many of their presentations, this keynote was packed with wonderful insights and quotes. Their thinking truly helps the general blockchain industry forward, that’s why I invest time in properly transcribing them, to make their thoughts searchable and quotable!
One of the great thinkers in the blockchain space is Brock Pierce. Although I started working with blockchain in 2013, I really started to grasp its potential after seeing this keynote by Brock Pierce in 2017.
Here’s a fully searchable transcript, enriched with slides where I found that relevant.
To improve your experience in navigating the amazing insights and quotes he shared, here’s a table of contents:
I have been a big fan of Matt Mullenweg’s work for more than a decade. In this fireside chat at CB Insights, at the end of 2017, he gives some great insight into WordPress (which he co-founded in 2003), Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com, which received a $300M investment from Salesforce in 2019, at a $3 billion post-money valuation) and his vision on the open web.
With the rise of social networks and closed platforms, Automattic’s mission statement has never sounded so important. It wants to build a strong foundation to empower content creators for decades to come.
Automattic is creating the operating system for the web, from websites to e-commerce to social networks.
Here’s a fully searchable transcript of the fireside chat, discussing:
In the video, there are quotes by Sean Parker and Chamath Palihapitiya, both were former-executives at Facebook. I made a transcription of the full video, to make their quotes and insights searchable.
Roadmap for The Decade of Open-Source (2020 to 2030): Let’s Fix the Broken Web, Together!
You made it; welcome to this fresh new decade!
Looking back at 30 years of the internet, we should be proud. Mankind’s achievements are enormous. We have perfectly organized everything in the world, mostly user-friendly at the same time. With Google we find information, we use Facebook and LinkedIn to organize the people in our lives, and we travel with platforms like Uber.
Without the vigorous leadership of giants like these, we would have been nowhere near today’s state.
However, this will not be a sad story. I’m hopeful and optimistic that 80-90% of all the problems we face with the internet, can be fixed in the coming 10 to 25 years. However, I do believe that the coming decade is a crucial one.
I work full-time with open-source software for over a decade (I co-founded my WordPress agency in 2006), actively contributing (WP GDPR, 1,3M+ downloads & Laraberg, bringing WordPress’ editor to Laravel). From that perspective, I thought it would be valuable to remix powerful insights and quotes of thought leaders in open-source; plotting a roadmap for the new decade.
As the opportunity we have fascinates me, I hereby declare this the Decade of Open-Source. #DecadeofOpenSource
Why should 2020-2030 be the Decade of Open Source?
The web as we know it is broken(plagiarism, revisionism, click-baiting, exploitation, fake news, mass manipulation, democracy is at risk…), but …
… at the same time, building blocks, big thinkers and best practices are in place to start decently fixing a lot of these problems in the coming 10 years.
Last June, I gave a presentation for 2,500 developers called “From WordPress to blockchain, the Future is 100% Open Source” at the world’s largest WordPress conference. This article, published at the dawn of the new decade (2020 to 2030), is a follow-up to this presentation.
Utrecht, The Netherlands – Last Thursday, Blockchain Netherlands organized a meetup dedicated to blockchain timestamping. I presented our vision on how Content Timestamps have the ability to redefine the web as we know it while bringing back integrity. Let’s fix the web, together!
Here’s a summary of my presentation, including four ways to fix the broken web, today:
4 Solutions to Fix the Broken Web with Content Timestamps:
With an Open Source platform like WordPress, as a Publisher or Merchant, you are resilient against Censorship. #OwnYourData
Timestamping an Open Source Fingerprint of this content and its revisions with blockchain, so you have a Proof of Existence; a Certificate of Birth.
Make this Content Timestamp Verifiable by any Human in an Open Source manner; reader, buyer etc.
Make this Content Timestamp Verifiable by any Machine in an Open Source manner; Search Engines, Social Media, etc.
At London Fintech Week (Juli 26th, 2017), Brendan Blumer talked about timestamps during his presentation called Decentralized Funding and the New Corporate Structure.
In five years from now, if you don’t timestamp your articles on the blockchain, you’re going to be considered a fraud.
Brendan Blumer, CEO Block.One, 2017, London
That quote played an important role in the inception of WordProof. Here’s a transcript of that quote and its context:
I want to jump straight into examples, as I think examples are some of the best ways to understand what’s going on and how these things are functioning.
So, I want to look at SteemIt. It is a very interesting project, it is a content network, where everything that you see on SteemIt.com is actually on the blockchain. It is a blockchain itself. In fact, this website has no central server. It is actually a block explorer.
I don’t know if you guys have ever seen something like etherscan, where you actually can go in and read what’s going on on the blockchain itself. That is what this website is. Everything is on the blockchain, every piece of content, every interaction.
And it lives in a completely decentralized capacity, in which nobody can shut it down, nobody can take control of it, and it is accessible by everybody. It removes the ability to censor data completely.
Blockchain is becoming part of best practices.
Brendan Blumer, CEO Block.One, in 2017, London.
In five years from now, if you don’t timestamp your articles on the blockchain, you’re going to be considered a fraud.
If you don’t put your content on the blockchain, you’re going to be considered a revisionist or someone that censors material.
Timestamping is becoming a part of best practices, and these organizations will become something that people can trust, at a degree that you can’t trust centralized entities.
So SteemIt is a really phenomenal project.
Every time you actually create content and you put it on the blockchain,
Every day a certain amount of tokens are emitted from the network, and those go to all the content creators, proportioned to how much the public has upvoted or liked that content.
If you want to advertise on that platform, like you would promote a post on Facebook or Google AdWords, you need to buy tokens from those people that had created content.
Now you’ve just completely closed the economic loop. There is no profit, right? Profits can represent pricing inefficiency. When a shirt costs $5 and you’re paying $10, $5 of that is essentially wasted and has gone to the people who did the work to actually bring you that product, but when the community is doing the work itself, you don’t need to think about things like that.
So it becomes very difficult for centralized entities to compete on a pricing level and on an innovation level.
Block.One’s Chief Technology Officer Dan Larimer discusses the future of blockchain at the 2019 Blocksburg Summit. After writing a full transcript of his keynote, here you’ll find the full transcript of the Q&A on how blockchain is evolving.
Firstly, a table of content to make this extremely valuable collection of insights easier to navigate through:
