So - I am really glad that I went to Wordcamp SA yesterday (Cape Town).  Having the chance to hear

Matt Mullenweg, founder and creator of Wordpress was truly inspirational. He was the “nicest guy in the room” and for a Geek “rock-star” - salt of the earth. A great example and lesson learnt. Be successful with humility.

He really believes in the core principles of the open source movement - and was very interesting to  hear about his perspectives on the Wordpress business model. He is a

self-professed capitalist and stressed embracing the “economics of abundance”; ie - scale to such a level that you can still make money by skimming without upsetting the values of sharing and free IP to its fullest. Hence my belief that Open Source is a complex kind of ultruism. And to do it in a way that he has done takes faith - and balls.

Matt was funny, light-hearted but packed with a mega-ton of authority and intellect. Some of the Key potent statements/points he made.

- Selling software is dead

- Open Source will eventually also dominate the desktop and design over time.
-Open source domination in new areas takes time but eventually will happen
- Looking at Twitter’s rise he admits he did not see microblogging coming even though it was obvious when he looks back.
- Those who share and are open will always win at the end.
- WP version 2.6.1 is the first “not required” release. ie - no bug fixes etc.
- Even if you are in SA, think Global

Slideshow below from my Photobucket account -

You can also check out the Albums with captions and tags here.

The other highlight was discovering that Warwick Poole, an engineer for Wordpress who was part of the touring party was the very same Warwick Poole that I was at varsity with and kindly drove me all the way from Grahamstown to PE after I was half-dying of tick bite fever at the Grahamstown festival. Wow - lekker to see that a fellow Rhodie is working in NY at one of the coolest online brands in the world. Nice. Warwick aslo gave a very cool chat about the WP architecture and made some interesting comments on the differences between how they and other like twitter do things when talking to Amazon S3. But I won’t get to technical here. I will sure to skype Warwick when are having scaling issues : ).

The guys were geeking out and obviously everyone was live-blogging so I decided to sit back and enjoy. So I’ve posted some snaps I took instead.

Also got some cool sticker for my laptop (thanks Tyler) - which is always nice.

Last highlight was to finally meet Stii Pretorius in the flesh.  A veritable smoking buddy on the day.

Charl covered it live here

It’s been nuts - but there have been a few great highlights.

It all started last Friday at the Quirk eMarketing Textbook launch at the very cool Book Lounge in Cape Town. The highlight was getting to meet Rob Stokes in person. He is a really passionate guy. I love passionate people. He is also sharp as hell - which I also like and we spoke the same language. I think they have done a great thing. Marketers need to learn how to manipulate the web and the current set of traditional agencies do not have a clue. As the media becomes more fragmented Search becomes more and more important. Bottom line = Get found or die.

Here’s Rob, myself and Dave Duarte having a YAK!

Then it was off to JHB on Monday first thing with Charl Norman and Bradley Voges - 2 of the Blueworld founders, - we had a crazy trip set up with meetings almost every hour. Business on steriods - the Naspers way : ) But it was awesome - everyone we saw was very excited about Blueworld and now we have lots of following up to do.

And on the Monday night we got to hear Charl in action at the JHB 27 Dinner at Melrose Arch. He did well. The other speakers - hmmm.

The highlight was that I finally got to meet a few virtual peeps in the flesh - Tyler Reed, Eve D, Nic H, Melissa Attree and Mike Stopforth for the first time.

Then it was on to the Media24 conference for 2 days at Monte Casino and we stayed at the Palazzo hotel which was swank : ) It’s management from Newspapers, magazine and online - but print dominated. I think that we are just different religions at the end of the day. But one clear thing is that now people are seeing online as more of an opportunity than a threat - which is progress.

I got to give a presentation which was lekker because I got to showcase Blueworld as well as talk to some web 2.0 trends. The highlight was when I said that CONTENT IS A BAD BUSINESS TO BE IN!-  that caused a silence. But more on my thinking behind that point in another post. I also said that Mass media was a thing of the past and that the current business model is making less and less sense.

So lots of speaches, booze and networking. Now I am taking a day off before another manic week ahead.