WordPress creator Mullenweg is many bloggers' best friend

SAN FRANCISCO -- While still in high school in Texas, Matt Mullenweg created blogging software he hoped would be easier and prettier to use. Less than six years later, Mullenweg's WordPress has become the No. 2 blogging platform behind Google's Blogger, signing up 10,000 new bloggers daily.

WordPress has become so entrenched on the Web that many of the biggest names use it now — a roster that includes CNN, Fox News and The New York Times, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Coca-Cola and General Electric, along with millions of ordinary bloggers.

"People might start with LiveJournal or Blogger, but if they get serious, they'll graduate to WordPress. We try to cater to the more powerful users," says Mullenweg, 25.

WordPress.com— where folks sign up to create their blogs — was the 37th-most-visited site in December, attracting 24 million visitors, according to measurement firm ComScore Media Metrix. Worldwide, WordPress hosts 12 million blogs, which attracted just over 200 million readers in December.

WordPress is free for anyone to use on their own. Business customers who want technical support pay $2,500 to $5,000 a year through Automattic, the start-up Mullenweg founded in 2005 to operate WordPress. Automattic also offers fee-based anti-spam software services.

WordPress is "open-source" software, which means that anyone can access and contribute to the program code, with plug-ins and downloads that can take a WordPress blog to new heights. Examples include ways to add contact forms, reader statistics, comment spam filters and "page-flip" photo galleries to your blog.

It was the open-source approach that persuaded Danny Sullivan, who runs the Search Engine Land website, to switch recently to the WordPress platform from rival Movable Type, which is owned by Six Apart.

So many of Search Engine Land's editors and programmers preferred working with WordPress, "that it just made it easier," Sullivan says.

Software has a big fan: CNN

CNN runs 30 blogs, and they're all created the same way the general consumer does it: Programmers go to WordPress.com, sign up and create.

CNN programmers tweak the basic templates afterward to CNN's needs, so that a CNN blog looks nothing like, say, a blog from Time magazine or Fox News. "It looks like a website that would have taken six to nine months to create, but it's a blog we made in just a few hours," says Dermot Waters, a senior producer for CNN.

Not everyone uses WordPress. Some of the biggest blogs — including the Huffington Post, Gizmodo, Boing Boing and Lifehacker— use Movable Type, while the Daily Kos opts for Scoop.

Sullivan says the drawback to working with WordPress is that it has become so popular that it's "open to security issues."

Hackers found ways to add links to their sites in WordPress blogs, a technique aimed at improving their Google rankings, but a new December release addresses that with a security update, Mullenweg says. When folks sign in to update their WordPress blogs now, they automatically get the latest software.

Automattic began with $1.1 million in funding from several venture-capital firms. After an unsolicited bid for the company came in for $150 million — Mullenweg won't say from whom — it received a second $29.5 million round of financing. Investors in the company include VC firms Polaris, True and Radar, and the New York Times Co.

Mullenweg decided not to sell the company because, "It became clear that the road ahead was much longer than the road behind us," he wrote on his Ma.tt blog in January 2008.

Automattic has 35 employees — all of whom work from home. Only five are based in San Francisco, where Automattic has a small showroom-like office on Pier 38, by the San Francisco Bay.

"We're profitable," Mullenweg says. "Our goal was never to make the most money possible, just enough to sustain our growth and contribute as much back to open source as possible."

Back home in Katy, Texas, Mullenweg's mom, Kathe, remembers her son working on the idea for WordPress on the family computer in the kitchen.

When he told her about it, "I thought, this could give a voice to anyone with Internet access," she recalls. "It could really make the world a smaller place."

He quit the University of Houston after two years when tech news site CNet offered him a job in San Francisco and said he could continue dabbling with WordPress on the side. He left CNet when WordPress got too demanding.

Mom says her son is so focused on WordPress, "Sometimes he forgets to eat and sleep. He's a young man in a hurry. He never stops. I keep telling him to slow down."

Mullenweg originally hoped for a career as a jazz saxophonist, but he got sidetracked by programming. He also pursued photography — for his 25th birthday post, he vowed to display some 25,000 photos on his blog this year.

He can always find time to blog, he says.

"I can post something, and five minutes later, people from all over the world can react to it," he says. "We can have a really great conversation right there on the blog. That's pretty neat."