WebProNews does a brilliant job introducing coverage of Search Marketing Expo West 2008 in this great viral video. You probably have to be an SEO insider to get it though. The video production is just really well put together. Love the music and sound effects. Looks like it was fun to make. Kudos to Mike McDonald and the WebProNews crew for putting it together.

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It was extraordinarily cool to meet WordPress creator and Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg at a Utah WordPress Meetup on Saturday, February 2, 2008. Matt is an all around nice guy who is unassuming and very laid back. Despite his reserved nature, I think he has a million ideas in his head at any given moment. His ability to really listen to and get to know people was evident as he mentioned about a thousand past conversations he’d had with many people I know of (and many I didn’t). At 24 years old, he’s only created one of the most-loved blogging platforms ever (WordPress), built one of the coolest companies on the planet (Automattic), raised millions in venture capital, and managed to put together a phenomenal team dedicated (pure and simple) to developing free and open source web software for all.

A media darling with serious geek appeal, Automattic quite expectedly makes my list of most-favorite-companies-in-the-world because they manage to combine extraordinary developer talent with a business model built around open source all the while maintaining blog, anti-spam, identity, wikis, forum software, and more via a world-wide spread of developer locations from Australia to Bulgaria. Talk about breaking the barriers of a normally prohibitive job market demographic… don’t let geography get in the way of hiring the most talented developers! I would love to hear more about Matt’s thoughts on his process for hiring such an amazing team. The Automattic outfit completely fascinates me.

Special thanks to Joseph Scott, Automattic’s brilliant “Bug Exorcist,” for organizing the lunch.