The origin of the series actually dated back to January’s WordCamp Boston, where Jeff moderated a panel I organized called “Monetization in a Free World”, intended to help the audience understand the commercial WordPress themes, plug-ins, and SaaS businesses. Jeff ended up being in an impossible position, with 40 minutes to cover all 3 models and incorporate Automattic’s perspective, visa vi Jane Wells. Jeff and I decided it was worth doing justice to the idea; and so the April series of podcast episodes came to life.

The first episode (WordPress Weekly #94) was focused on commercial themes, and was a great kick off. Over 2 hours long, we interviewed Brian Gardner, founder of StudioPress, Cory Miller of iThemes (who had a newer commercial theme developer in the room with him), and Jason Schuller of Press75. All three had strong opinions, clear passion, and a memorable fondness for one another. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg made a surprise appearance late in the show with a few questions of his own. The feedback was terrific, which really inspired us going into the following episodes.

The second episode (WP Weekly #95) explored commercial plug-ins. The panel featured the outspoken Carl Hancock of GravityForms, the articulate and passionate Jonathan Davis of Shopp, and Ronald Huereca of AJAX Edit Comments. This one lasted nearly 2 1/2 hours, and felt a bit more rounded out, in part due to Ronald’s candor about his challenges.

Part three (WP Weekly #96) turned to Software as a Service (or SaaS) business models, and was a little over 2 hours. I found myself challenged to weave the narrative of the three very different businesses together, and I think the episode felt a little less cohesive as a result. On the positive side, I think there was some good give and take with Automattic’s Raanan Bar-Cohen about the nature of Automattic’s position in the community.

WP Weekly episode #97 wrapped up the series with a “short” 1 hour wrap up and reflection episode. Jeff and I reviewed feedback from the earlier episodes, shared what we learned and what surprised us during during the series, and analyzed how two big pieces of news in the open platform (but not open source!) world influenced our reactions. Despite my concerns, I think there was a lot of meat in the latter half of the wrap episode, including a “meta-discussion” about the consulting model, and some words about the “meaning” of Automattic’s and WordPress’ unique position in the community.

Inspired by a few WordCamps that built themselves up from local WordPress meet ups, I finally got a few locals together at the beginning of April (Ken DeBlois of Brown and Suzanne McDonald, a freelance writer) to help organize a Providence Meetup. A couple of planning meetings, a new website, a Twitter account, and some local marketing later, we had our first meet up on April 26th.

I’ll be blogging over at the WordPress Providence website, so I won’t say too much about it in this forum, but the headline is that I was thrilled by the turn out and energy at our first event. We had about 30 attendees, a lot of buzz during the hour of networking, a nice and short presentation by DandyID (a local firm with a popular plug-in), and a great after-presentation brainstorming / discussion session.

The feedback has been positive, and we organizers are jazzed to keep the momentum going. On top of our base from the first meet up, I know at least a handful of people who wanted to come but had conflicts, and we already have a couple of RSVPs for our next meet up who were not at at our inaugural event.

In addition to the official website I scraped together, be sure to check out my guest post on RI Nexus, and some photographs of our first meet up over on Flickr. And if you’re in the Rhode Island area, come to our next meet up on May 25th!

They used my remarks concerning small businesses benefiting from joining larger pools, and my general comment about no one favoring tax increases but taxes being secondary to fixing the overall cost curve (this was in response to the reporter pressing on taxes). They cropped a comment I made about the benefits of remaining a parent’s healthcare plan after school until the age of 26. That would have benefited me for about 2 months during my transition period after graduation, and I believe would have benefited my sister for a period of time too.

One of the sessions I attended was Ramil Teodosio’s WordPress Powered-Intranets. I’ve done a few Intranet implementations of my own and Ramil’s seminar was a bit more focused on SharePoint-like substitution than I expected. My own experience gave me an opportunity to pipe up a couple of times to offer suggestions and, among other things, plug my free Restricted Site Access plug-in, which was born out of an Intranet project, and I thought might be of interest to the audience. Judging by the post-presentation follow-up with a handful of attendees, at least a few found my comments useful.

That session has been posted on WordPress.tv. While I don’t have that much that’s interesting to say (and audio is iffy), you can see my chime in at about the 24:30 and 30:00 marks.

Speaking of Restricted Site Access, I need to get around to incorporating the fork / changes added by Eric Buth who contacted me recently. It’s always great to see others build on your own open-source projects!

Topics included:

• General WordPress consulting services
• WordPress value perception as compared to other major CMS platforms
• Exciting developer features coming in WordPress 2.9 (RC1 out today!)
• What the near future holds for WordPress, with the MU merge and growth of BuddyPress, bbPress, et al
• My latest Smashing Magazine article
• WordCamp Boston (which I’m helping organize)

I really enjoyed participating in the podcast, and hope to participate again in the near future.