The person behind WordPress is Matt Mullenweg. He mentioned on his blog this evening that he’d recently done an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald.

If you’re not familiar with Matt’s work, I suggest you give it a read. It’s easy to forget some of the amazing developments Matt’s had a hand in over the last few years:

1. He started up the WordPress project and turned it into possibly the most popular blogging platform on the planet. I would say that it’s the tool used by most serious bloggers out there today.
2. Along with Dougal Campbell, he developed “Ping-O-Matic, a tool that notifies search engines of blog updates.” This is a crucial component of what I cringingly call the blogosphere. It allows services like Technorati to know about new content on a website rather than having to crawl it periodically to discover it.
3. He’s been involved with the group that pioneered Microformats (I’ll write about these another time!).
4. As co-creator of Akismet, not only does he provide the best blogging software, but he helps prevent comment spam from making blogging a nightmare!

I’m writing this post for a couple of reasons. a) I was stunned at how much work this guy has done to advance blogging, b) I’m convinced he’s going to revolutionize blogging yet again, and c) I owe the guy a big thank you.

The thank you, Matt is for providing such a life-altering piece of software for free. Blogging provides people with a new means of connecting with a potentially limitless audience, allows them to clarify their thoughts and feelings in words and allows the professional bloggers among us to make a decent (some would say indecent) living! And having tried some of the alternatives, I honestly believe WordPress is synonymous with blogging.

So there you go.