Jonathan is an accomplished artist, known for seminal web projects like We Feel Fine which panned the Internet for fragmentary ideas and words to sluice out meaning and emotion.

The posts are simple rough gems of photography and epiphanies, often abetted by travel, that reveal the stories and people behind them.

I enjoyed these two stories: Mesa Verde, CO, Jan. 20, 2010 and Los Angeles, Jan. 22, 2010.

Amazing what you can still do with just words and pictures.

I started, mainly for work, when I joined Mozilla, and everything about it was kind of a revelation at the time.

Not many places incorporated regular blogging then, and it was another sign I’d made a good choice in joining Mozilla, which was pioneering ways of creating open source software and building a global community.

The main thing I came to love about blogging was interacting with people who cared about what I was writing, whether they agreed with it or not. Over time, I learned about a whole bunch of folks who were doing incredible things to help the Web, and connected with people whose work I’d admired. (None of this is news to you if you blog.)

Joining Automattic has been a whole new experience of diving into the deep end of the pool.

I haven’t blogged as much as I would have liked mainly because there’s been so much going on. Like 24/7 communication with my excellent co-workers — we all work from our homes or the road, no commute, and a lounge instead of an office — and with WordPress community members who are blogging zealots in the best possible way. Thank you for welcoming me to the community and feeding me tons of interesting ideas (I’m looking at you, Jeff Chandler). My life has been too exciting to blog about as a result, I swear.

But I love and have missed writing and connecting with others through my blogging. So I’ll try to slow it down just a bit and share more here.  Also, I’m going to start pulling in pieces of my activity on other services to supplement the posts like this one. My most used web services these days are WordPress.com (here and for Automattic work), Twitter (which is already syndicated in one of the WordPress.com widgets at right), Flickr, Foursquare, and Delicious.

I see a lot of resetting and rebooting of people’s blogs in 2010. WordPress.com continues to evolve and I’ll share here some of the things these changes enable, like better integration with social networks and improved alternatives for many different kinds of web publishing.

I run this blog on WordPress.com with domain mapping, and I’ll try to make it clear when I’m using tools that are non-obvious — right now that includes custom CSS, the P2 theme (as interpreted by MT), Typekit fonts and several widgets.

Four months in, I can report that I am now part of a stealthy force that is as ingenious and disruptive as my one year old daughter. Striving always to be generous, while uniting code, art, life and the Internet to distribute the collective wisdom of a global community (we’re ambitious! ). I find it fascinating that we are this small — just 50 of us spread out all over the world — yet so mighty because we are part of a worldwide open source community.

So, yes, please stay tuned to find out what other creative brews we have cooking. And as always, help spread the news about WordPress!

I’m excited about this release because I’ve become a fan of the iPhone after some initial skepticism, centered around the physical interface (I do still miss the keyboard of my Blackberry 8703e). Over time I’ve come to appreciate the iPhone’s integration, polish and utility. Maybe too much, if you ask my wife.

With WordPress 2, the development team has created a high quality blogging app, one that I think many iPhone users will enjoy putting through its paces.

If you blog with WordPress I think you’ll appreciate the ease of connecting your existing WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress blog, the streamlined post and comments interfaces, and persistence and restoration features to preserve your work should you switch apps or lose your network connection.

On the reading side, we turned on mobile themes for smartphones and feature phones by default for WordPress.com blogs a couple of weeks ago, improving the accessibility of blog content for mobile readers. (Self-hosted WordPress bloggers can add the WPTouch plugin to offer a mobile device optimized layout to their readers.)

Three more cool things to try:

1. Configure Publicize for your blog to push your posts to Twitter and Yahoo! automatically
2. Post by Email is an alternative method for posting from your iPhone (or any other email-capable mobile device) – details here.
3. WordPress for Blackberry is also available (as with WordPress for iPhone, a joint my colleague Raanan worked on).

Future releases of WordPress for iPhone are already in the works. Like much of what we do, this is an open source project and the team welcomes feature requests, feedback, and bug reports.

Here’s a roundup of reviews and blogger reactions:

WordPress’ sophomore iPhone debut impresses
- Josh Lowensohn, CNET

WordPress for iPhone 2: Mobile Blogging Just Got Easier
- Frederic Lardinois, ReadWriteWeb

iPhone apps that bloggers will love
- Dave Caolo, The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Top 10 Must Have iPhone Apps for Bloggers
- WPBeginner.com

iPhone Apps That Bloggers Need
- Brian X. Chen, Wired

WordPress for iPhone OS 2.0: a Review
- Wayne Dixon, Macgasm

WordPress 2 for iPhone/iPod Touch
- Stephen Ingraham, Cloudy Days and Netbook Nights

I started with Automattic last week. I’ll be focusing my time on driving new user growth and existing user engagement and retention.

I’m beyond excited about this opportunity. (If I could do a silly walk to demonstrate just how excited I am, I would.)

As a representative form of the profound shift in agency and connection that has emerged around the world with the rise of the Web, blogging is a powerful and meaningful activity. One that has rapidly matured to encompass innumerable personal expressions and the social interactions that attend to them. In blogging, I see the progression and explication of many longtime human pursuits – exploration, storytelling, knowledge sharing, collaboration, among others – that ultimately benefit us all. And, coupled to this, a disruptive capability that is only just beginning to be felt as blogging has become widespread as a technology.

It should be no surprise, then, that I was a believer in WordPress (the product, the open source project, and the movement) for years before joining the team at Automattic. When I started talking to Matt and Toni about how I could help, I kept coming back to what I believe are three key drivers of success for WordPress.

1) Product is best in class and continually improves to meet user demands. WordPress has emerged to become the most widely used self-hosted blogging platform (powering several million blogs) because of its functionality, user experience, ease of installation and customizability. Add to the mix nine major releases since 0.70 and a relentless focus by the developers on making WordPress better. This foundation of product strength and improvement is a baseline requirement for user growth.

2) Free and open source from the roots up. “Open source” can be much more than a development methodology. For me, it also constitutes a world view that upends institutionalized notions of competitive advantage that saw their apex in the twentieth century. Many much more eloquent people have written about the benefits of open source software development – I encourage you to dig in if you are interested to the corpus of knowledge that is widely available.

For me there are two important factors that an open source orientation introduces to a commercial offering:

• moving the business up the value chain
• increasing the intelligence and creativity applied to developing, marketing and supporting the product.

For WordPress, the core product is freely available at wordpress.org. Automattic’s current business builds on top of the free and open WordPress software to deliver services at WordPress.com and through support contracts with a range of publishers. A snapshot of the breadth of the WordPress ecosystem: over 6,500 plug-ins, 970 themes, and 4,700 WordPress consultants.

3) Community. The network enables massive, widespread communication and action. The speed, reach and scale of the network is a major asset for the growth of a new breed of companies and products. In the case of WordPress, a passionate, active community has been working to spread the story for years, to great effect. Collaborating with this community, of which Automattic is just one part, can be a catalyst for growth – both in adoption and engagement – in the years ahead.

A network is a possibility factory.
- Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy

I feel lucky to be joining Automattic at this particular time. While serving tens of millions of bloggers on a regular basis, we’re also contributing to the innovations that will power the next stage of growth for the Web. From our support for RSS Cloud to the launch of an AI-powered editing tool, and more to come, Automattic is strongly positioned to rock the Web. In addition to providing the interaction of social networks and realtime communication tools, WordPress powers independence - of expression, thought and vision.

As I get underway with this new adventure, I’m mindful of how much I have to learn from the WordPress community. I hope to meet many of you at WordCamps and to brainstorm about ways to introduce the power of WordPress to as many bloggers-to-come as we can, working together.

I’m very happy to be a part of Automattic and to contribute to the ongoing success of WordPress.

I’m extremely proud to have been a part of the Mozilla project, and to have worked side by side with so many of you in our community to accomplish things that seemed at one time audacious and improbable. From the launch of Firefox 1.5, through too many outreach programs to count, and as the number of people exercising a choice in the way they got on the Web climbed past 300 million, I’ve always been struck by the essential human-centeredness that permeates Mozilla.

You can see this spirit in the shared excitement on our blogs as new Web features get activated and in the personal touches groups of Mozilla supporters all over the world display in welcoming a new release. For me, this is at the core of how Mozilla, a tiny organization (really!), can compete and win against titans. In the years to come, the Web will need entities like Mozilla, that exist solely to advance the public benefit and the interests of the people, more than ever.

I have no doubt Mozilla will keep surprising the world.

Fiesta de lanzamiento de Firefox 3.5 GTO by cellfrozen

Great photo of a community party for the release of Firefox 3.5 held in Guanajuato, Mexico.