Speakers in the News »

4/14/06
MATTHEW MULLENWEG

Matt Mullenweg

Matthew Mullenweg of Automattic, the company behind the popular personal publishing tool WordPress as well as the spam-filtering software Akismet, has announced that his company has received a small amount of venture capital funding. Writing on his blog, he explains, "The growth of WordPress.com and Akismet has outpaced anyone’s expectations. Recently, I made the decision to sell a minority stake in the company to a few select partners who I think are going to bring a lot of value to the business far beyond mere dollars. This isn’t going to change how the business is run, or the people involved with it, but it will allow us to take better advantage of the opportunities before us and also for us to keep our promise to every one of you to maintain a fast, stable, and innovative platform in the long term. Automattic isn’t going to get fancy SoMA offices, throw huge parties at SxSW, or 'get big fast.' We took a small amount of capital to put things that were already growing fast in a stable position, so from month to month you’re not robbing Peter to pay Paul. We’re going to use the money to pre-emptively address scaling issues before they happen, and continue to share everything we can back to the community, like all of the code behind WP.com in WordPress MU, the spellchecking feature we sponsored, free Akismet for 99.9% of users, and a few other goodies we still have up our sleeve." His proclamations of "no huge parties at SXSW" notwithstanding, congrats to Mullenweg on the continued growth and success of his projects. A native Texan, he spoke on the "DIY Now More Than Ever" panel at this year's Interactive Festival.

11:14am CST | +

4/13/06
TARA HUNT

What is pinko marketing, you ask? Tara Hunt of riya.com explains this concept in a recently posted interview on netsquared: "Pinko marketing is commons-based un-marketing. This means basically that the marketing director [of the given company] is no longing doing the directing. Rather than marketing outwards to people, you are letting the community that you are serving determine the messages for you." One of the founders of Barcamp, Hunt spoke on the "Increasing Women's Visibility on the Web: Whose Butt Should We be Kicking?" panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival. This clip of Hunt was filmed by Geek Entertainment TV's Eddie Codel, who participated in the "How to Add Video to Your Blog" panel at this year's event.

11:46am CST | +

4/12/06
ANDY BUDD

"This book was written for people like me," explains James McNally in his review of "CSS Mastery", the new book by Andy Budd (pictured above). "I design and maintain several Web sites but would never refer to myself as a 'Web designer' or a 'Web developer' and certainly not a 'user experience designer.' You see, people with those titles usually know where to find answers to their arcane CSS queries, and many are active on CSS mailing lists and have crammed their RSS readers full of great CSS resources, which they read long into the evenings while drinking Red Bull. But the truth is that for many of us, this is overwhelming and intimidating." Budd led the "How to Be A Web Design Superhero" panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.

10:33am CST | +

4/11/06
DAVE SHEA

Click on Odeo to hear Scott Fegette of Adobe interview Dave Shea, the man behind CSS Zen Garden. Conducted during this year's SXSW, Shea talks about how CSS-based design has increased in popularity in recent years: "Adoption [of CSS standards] has been huge, especially in the last couple of years. I think 2004 and 2005 were kind of the big years where big sites were launched using standards-based designs. Wired News, of course, kicked it all off -- and that was in 2002, so talk about early adopters. ESPN came next in early 2003. CSS Zen Garden came out in May of 2003 and then a whole bunch of very large sites followed . . . I wouldn't say right now we are at the point where every new design coming out is categorically going to be standards-based, but there is definitely a feeling that the expectation is there. And, if you are redesigning a major site that isn't built using standards, you are going to have a lot of people complaining. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, but it certainly has been effective." Shea served on the "CSS Problem Solving" panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival; he also spoke on the "Demystifying the Mobile Web" session at this year's event.

12:09pm CST | +

4/10/06
PRENTISS RIDDLE

Prentiss Riddle

Now that many mainstream outlets have adopted blog technology, the distinction between old media and new media grows ever more murky. A new service called BlugBurst will further confuse these boundaries. Notes Eric Auchard in a Reuters story about this development, "A syndication service that delivers commentary from 600 bloggers for use by newspaper publishers is set to launch on Tuesday, further blurring the lines that divide blogs and mainstream media. . . Newspapers are looking to BlogBurst to provide expert blog commentary on travel, women's issues, technology, food, entertainment and local stories, areas where publishers may not have dedicated staff, Pluck Chief Executive Dave Panos said. In return, a select group of popular bloggers are offered wider distribution for their writings, he said. The online syndicate drives traffic to blog sites, allowing featured bloggers to make money from resulting online advertising." The BlogBurst is owned by Pluck, an Austin-based company that hosted the Web Awards After Party at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival. Pluck also contributed two speakers to this year's event: Prentiss Riddle (pictured above), who spoke on the "Tagging 2.0" panel and Adam Weinroth, who led a Geek Lunch Series session on "Citizen Journalism"