The Expo opened with a few words from Matt Mullenweg, the creator of Wordpress, thanks to which you now read this blog. He said the secret to his success in creating a multi-million dollar blogging platform that sees 100 million users a month is the hiring. With 18 employees comprising the whole company, he adds only two new hires per quarter.

“When you find people who are willing to do it regardless of the living, then it’s not work,” Mullenweg said. “It’s fun.”

His advice to aspiring bloggers was laden with common sense. Early on in the blogosphere, he said, there were many “rules” on how to create a good blog: you should have 14 posts on the front page, sidebars should look a certain way and so on. What he realized is the thing that makes the blogger stand out most, is a bit of originality.

“You really want to find what’s unique about you,” Mullenweg told the crowd. “You have to be unique and you have to love what you’re doing.”

One blogger asked him how to get more visitors to the site. Most likely she was expecting some formula, tips or tricks. Mullenweg recommended “fantastic passion in content,” admitting that Web surfers are “deluged in mediocrity.” It isn’t terribly complicated. Just because thousands of blogs spring to life each day doesn’t mean there are that many more competent writers in the world.

Well he did offer up one strategy. Get involved in the blogging community and comment on what others write. People link back to those that post good comments. He added that the blog is one of the most powerful social networking tools on the Web. It is so much more personal than most user profiles on MySpace, Facebook and other social networking platforms. Rather than lists of traits backed by haphazardly embedded pictures, a blog offers a truer window into one’s life and personality.

“I really feel that the best profile in the world of me is my blog,” said Mullenweg. He predicted that blogs will continue to become a growing part of the social networking world. He admitted that blogging software is not as developed as he would like.

“I still think that, in terms of writing on the web, the tools suck - Wordpress especially,” Mullenweg said. He mentioned some issues with his software’s spell check, amongst other things. “We’re on like, year four of a 10-year track.”

On multimedia content, he said features like video, audiocasting and podcasting are excellent enhancements to a blog. But the written word comes first.

“We always focus on writing and the media is a complement to that,” he said.

Mullenweg predicted that the open-source movement will end up revolutionizing how modern software is approached.

“Going open-source is not a business decision,” Mullenweg said. “It’s a philosophical choice.” He said open-source developers tend to take the most user-oriented approach to creating software. Also he mentioned that Craig Newmark, founder of Craigs List, impressed him a great deal once when asked why he doesn’t have ads on his site. He answered, “Because my users didn’t ask for it.”

On general online entrepreneurship, Mullenweg had an excellent point.

“The companies that have been most successful on the Internet have enabled an economy far greater than themselves,” he said. Look at Google and PayPal. These services enable people, they fill a certain need.”I think you have to get your user model before you get your business model.”

He remarked that the future of selling software is completely dead. Open-source will be the way of the future. This seems true enough. With all the Web applications available for free - covering search, storage, e-mail, documents and more - most tech savvy individuals balk at paying for any kind of software. You might even say Google is the new MS Office. Operating systems these days are becoming little more than a means of connecting computer hardware and the user to the Internet where most of the real work takes place.

Finally, Mullenweg added a few remarks about the rift between journalism and the blogopshere.

“Journalists have actual rules, but I tend to trust bloggers more because they are closer to the source,” he said. I’m not sure that being close to a source makes reporting more reliable. Perhaps a blogger will have an easy enough time finding out the general goings on. But when it comes to holding the powers that be to task, it is never easy to criticize those you are close to.

Mullenweg said journalists may not be experts in what they’re writing about; that they’ll get an assignment and push out the best 400 words they can, regardless of how passionate they are on the matter. Bloggers, he alleged, live and breathe the topic they write on. That is not actually a terrible point. Especially on general assignment beats, reporters these days tend to work in skeleton newsrooms where everybody has to overextend themselves to keep their papers even meeting the status quo. Perhaps there was a day where every reporter was afforded the time and resources to do a first-rate job. But until the media execs out there learn how profit with their news online, it’s going to be rough.

However, Mullenweg pointed out one thing threatening his beloved blogosphere. “Sponsored posts and pay-per-posts are a corrupting influence,” he said.

When you’re trying to figure out who to trust just remember to ask any source of news one question over and over: “Where’d that fact come from?” If the writer doesn’t say, take his or her words with a deer hunter sized salt lick.