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Exclusive interview

Mike Little: WordPress co-founder

In the history of WordPress –the tool that powers 45% of the web, including 10s of 1000s of film sites– Mike Little is Steve Wozniak to Matt Mullenweg’s Steve Jobs.

Matt polished the interface, the marketing and curly quotes – while Mike added the blogroll, rebuilt the code, and added the one-click easy-upgrade that’s been central to the success.

But unlike Woz, Mike never had shares in Matt’s $7bn business – or even a job there. He didn’t know you could make a living from WordPress until he turned up at a WordCamp. He hasn’t been knighted or hall-of-famed, and isn’t known outside of old WordPress developer circles.

Is this because he’s a cheerful and easy-going northerner from Stockport? Because he didn’t have a degree? Because he’s black? I don’t know. All I know for sure, is this is someone anyone in tech, or who uses WordPress, should know about. Not just because of his contributions: but because he’s the kind of hero we need more of.

Year 25, Issue 5

Becoming Little.

Photo of David Nicholas Wilkinson with his name overlayd and the sub-title 'Director, producer, founder Guerilla Films

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Link roundup…

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New Carnal Cinema…

Carnal Cinema returns!

The original Netribution was a rather serious mix of film funding listing, film festival deadlines, contacts, sunrise/sunset times and a weekly magazine interviewing a spectrum of indie film with news from across the country.

Adding some relief was Dr Andrew Cousin’s (aka Andrew Lowes) Carnal Cinema column – a satirical lens on the world of film. French Cartoonist Eric Dubois was so taken with them he first illustrated them, then put them together in the first of two books. We’ve printed 200 copies and after the print costs are recouped are splitting the income three ways between Eric. Andrew and Blood Cancer UK (in honour of Andrew’s dad – the late, great Leslie Lowes, aka James MAcGregor).

Available now @ www.CarnalCine.ma
A photograph of the Carnal Cinema book on a wooden table. It's hard-backed with cartoons across the top, Carnal Cinema against Orange beneath that, and some tiny text beneath that. A dark grey ribbon emerges from the bottom.
Pencil sketch of Paddy Morgan, curled over a cocktail in a whisky tumbler, further drinks and an ashtray besides him – large collars sticking out over his jacket.
Carnal Cinema

Oliver Reed, Richard Harris and Peter O’Toole were a breed of actor apart. Prodigiously talented on screen and with extremely tempestuous personal lives off screen. Booze, women and plenty of bust ups featured regularly. It was for that reason they acquired the nickname “the hell-raisers”. But there was one of their number who is less well celebrated, Paddy Morgan. Paddy might not have been a household name today, but his performances in movies such as “Where Stunt Doubles Dare”, “Touch of the Gorgon” and “Swords, Sandals and Slaves” made him much in demand in the sixties and seventies.

Paddy died in 2006 when his third liver finally decided it could cope no longer and literally exploded inside Paddy’s abdomen. Fortunately, Dr Andrew Cousins had just completed an interview with Paddy weeks before his untimely death. Never published until now, Dr Cousins meets the last of the hell-raisers…

Pencil imaginary sketch of Stanley Kubrick as a 12 year old with pencil, clipboard, baseball cap.
From the archives
Home
Community spaces
Still from the Brutalist film - Adrian Brody, flanked by concrete columns on both sides gestures to the left.
Three act structures
Re-intermediation

To reflect on Netribution’s 25 years since arriving online, we’ve published a year of issues reflecting on indie film and the web this last 25 years, and next 25.

You can subscribe via the @blog on any Fediverse app, our email Newsletter, and RSS.

This is powered by the WordPress ActivityPub plugin, and is a bit experimental: problems, please shout!

Contributors

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Articles

Mike Little: the British co-founder of WordPress you’ve probably never heard of (but should)…
In the story of WordPress –the tool that powers 45% of the web, including 10s of 1000s of film sites– Mike Little is Steve Wozniak to Matt Mullenweg’s Steve Jobs. Matt polished the interface, the marketing and curly quotes – while Mike added the bl…
Stories of politics vs the politics of stories…
The ‘keep politics out of cinema’ row that saw Arundhati Roy quit the Berlinale jury last weekend over chair Wim Wenders’ comments – is an odd debate because, of course, films are all political, whether they like it or not. They almost always show o…
The end of hero culture, Charlie XCX, TMDB, NonDe, Wall-E’s social storytelling & the BAFTA mess – some links…
Speaking of heroes, Ben Blaine (@ben)’s latest is about superhero culture, billionaires and Epstein – and is worth a read: “the mass public dumping of the Epstein files comes at the end of the Hero culture, where it is no longer quite enough to sti…
David Nicholas Wilkinson: indie docmaker & distributor on keeping his independence.
This interview follows David from paper-round to model, actor in London’s West End – bullied for his working class background – then on to production as the BBC’s first indie producer in the 80s. Then in the 90s, after unintentionally inventing the…
Pigeons and Cookies
At the end of a row of rental bikes outside Waterloo station some pigeons were greedily attacking a discarded packet of cookies. There were two snack types; white and dark chocolate. I stood watching the scene, smoking a cigarette and wondering how…
Web pioneer Cath Le Couteur on digital utopias, closing Shooting People, film collectives & the future.
> “I’m not an anti-tech person. Shooters was built on technology. But I am mindful that we want technology that doesn’t extract, technology that enables people.” Long before social networks and smart phones in the mid-90s, Cath entered the world’s…
Netribution, 25 years on
It’s 19-and-a-half years since I first emailed the late James MacGregor, in a state of major excitement: Netribution wanted to republish an article I’d written on work experience about short films! That was May 2006. A month or so before, my brot…
Reintermediation: humans over algorithms, restoring the web we lost
We swapped human curators for a profit-seeking algorithm. We replaced the independent record store manager who knows exactly the right tune to play at this moment, the video store clerk who’s watched 10,000 films, the magazine racks at the giant boo…
Remembering Jess Search and the early noughties web
With ShootingPeople – the groundbreaking email community Jess Search co-founded with Cath LeCouteur – closing after 27 years, I’m revisiting a piece I wrote after Jess’s death in 2023 which looked back not only at her impact, but that happy era onli…
Criticising the web as a tech grump
Thinking back to Web 1: there had been a tech giant: AOL and we’d all run away from it into the open web while it was gobbling up Time Warner, and there wasn’t another threat to the web until Microsoft, whose principle crime with Internet Explorer w…
Reflections on Epping: not just a community crisis but a content strategy
It’s sobering walking down a street 30 minutes from where you live – even in a crowd of 2000, majority women – to cries of ‘shame on you’ and ‘ped~~~~les’ from families stood in their drives with their kids. It’s not that the marchers didn’t have o…
My Mistakes: 1. Digital Asset Management
This isn’t how it was meant to be. No-one excited about the web in the late ’90s pictured an attention industry commodifying our consciousness to power a surveillance economy spying on us from birth, trading our data to segment & silo us, target adv…
Clay Shirky in 2005: if it’s really a revolution, it doesn’t take us from Point A to Point B. It takes us from Point A to chaos.
“As with the printing press, if it’s really a revolution, it doesn’t take us from Point A to Point B. It takes us from Point A to chaos. The printing press precipitated 200 years of chaos, moving from a world where the Catholic Church was the sort…
Ants
On the cusp of evening the ants explore the surface of the table. Some of them sprout wings, of a sudden, taking off unsteadily to mingle with the midges. I don’t know what the other ants are looking for. Not food. I’m sure of that. I haven’t dined…
Edito part 3: Three reasons this year seems right to talk about our 2022 project…
First the ActivityPub universe has gone from tech curiosity to something viable and used daily by millions. Second, mainstream monopoly tech – sacking moderating teams, trying to sway elections, and general indifference to the harms their huge power…
Edito part 2: 16 years later, the indie no-budget web of Netribution 1 & 2 has gone – enter ActivityPub.
It’s a strange time to be trying to build a standalone publication – just as most of the planet is focussed on funnelling their audience onto monopolistic platforms whose algorithms filter content like a dealer cutting attention-crack. If Tom and I…
I think it’s about time I explain why I’m doing this.
With Netribution’s 25 years fitting into three 8-ish year acts (publishing, research & development) I’ve applied Syd Field’s screenwriting framework to this year of issues and realised this issue would be the end of Act One. That seems a good time t…
Profile: Elena Rossini, pioneering Italian filmmaker charting a path away from big tech.
Self-declared ‘geriatric millennial’ Elena Rossini (@_elena) isn’t content to just make documentaries, self-distribute and market them thru a web of nicely designed sites – she’s pioneering in her use of tech away, and at home on the…
Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz (1929-2016), Fateless
“There are some people who suffer from this ‘[Auschwitz] disease’ for life, simply because of the experience they have gone through. Another group simply doesn’t talk about it. And a third group of people have learned to come to terms with these eve…
Lexi Alexander, Green Street, 2006
“I was teaching a martial arts class and a couple of guys showed up in my class. They were talking about my team, Mannheim, and because of the way they were dressed and because they were talking about my team, I immediately knew they were hooligans…
Rachel Weisz, The Constant Gardener, 2006
“I’ve never seen poverty on that level. A million people living in a very small space with no running water, no sanitation, no electricity, there’s a very high level of disease, HIV, and yet there’s that scene in the movie where the children come ru…
Profile: Ugandan sci-fi author & filmmaker Dilman Dila, running a micro-studio on a web that rarely treats Africans as equals.
It’s not easy to quickly summarise award-winning Ugandan Dilman Dila’s work: he’s made Nepalese documentaries like The Sound of One Leg Dancing, published a short story collection A Killing in the Sun and acclaimed novels, made hit YouTube shorts li…
The Terrible Tale of the Missing Turkey
Returning up the house road one hazy afternoon I was curious about the little orchard walled in on the T junction. I’d only seen it as an olive grove but this day a clementine caught my eye. In we loped, to have a mooch about, off leash, before dinn…
Update: Backlash to Academy Awards response over No Man’s Land co-director’s ‘lynching’ leads to apology, new statement
Over 600 members of the Academy for Motion Picture Arts and Science have condemned the body’s response to the attack by West Bank settlers on the Hamdan Ballal, co-director of this year’s Best Documentary Oscar winner, No Man’s Land. Ballal reported…
This year’s Best Doc Oscar-winner attacked by settlers, arrested & released.
The Palestinian co-director of the 2025 Academy Award winner for best picture, Hamdan Ballal has been attacked, arrested and is – at time of writing – out of contact. The Israeli co-director of the Oscar-winning Yuval Abraham said Ballal was attacke…
Jimmy’s Hall: a blueprint for community resilience in these times?
For host Gareth Evans the reason for this screening in this place, at this time seems obvious: Jimmy’s Hall is as much about the Hall – gathering space for a rural community struggling 10 years after the Irish Civil War against the church, state and…
Stephen Applebaum remembered
Stephen Applebaum, the best film interviewer I’ve known, died on February 7 2024 after his cancer returned. Netribution was incredibly lucky to publish his work for many years both online and in our books. Scrolling his Facebook page, it’s impossibl…
Mark Ruffalo in 2001, for You Can Count on Me
“I had a very difficult time. I actually quit at least 4 or 5 times. I couldn’t get a job. I had done 30 plays in Los Angeles and I couldn’t get a job. I was getting little jobs here and there, but no one was really recognising what I thought I had…
Michael White, writer/actor for Chuck and Buck, 2001 (writer School of Rock, The White Lotus)
Michael White: With Chuck and Buck I do think one of the biggest taboos, at least in America, is still men relating with other men in an honest, vulnerable way. It’s something you rarely see in anything, and I just find it amusing. It’s not keeping…
Jack Cardiff, cinematographer, in summer 2001
“When it came to my turn they started all this technical stuff and I said, ‘I don’t think I’m your man because I’m a dunce at a lot of these things’. “So there was a shocked silence and they said, ‘How do you expect to get on?’ I said, ‘Well I’m ve…
Kelly Reilly in 2001, for Peaches
So where did it all start? I can’t remember where it started. When I was very young I was always grabbing all my friends from down the street and making them put on plays with me. But I never, ever, ever, in my wildest dreams, thought that I could b…
John Boorman in 2001, for The Tailor of Panama
“I think if you put people, actors for instance, under duress, something suddenly happens: you get past acting. Kubrick did that when he was making The Shining. I had dinner with Jack Nicholson and he said, ‘He did 140 takes. It took two days t…
Ken Russell in 2001, for The Fall of the Louse of Usher
Would a film like The Devils be hard to make now? It would be impossible. No one would finance such a film, I would imagine. Hasn’t the British Film Industry improved? Well I’m not so mad on the British film industry. It seems to just produce one o…
The Brutalist: does the end justify the means?
Before I dig down, trying to deconstruct the film’s foundations, first off, this was the most sensory impact I’ve had at the cinema in a long time. It sounds as big as it looks, and it looks breathtaking. Part of that must be the VistaVision, a 70-y…
Chili & Raja
They are in my care. I feed them once a day and walk them twice. I provide emotional security too, for their family is holidaying on other continents. This is why I am here. And they are too my living, breathing companions on this winter trip. Almos…
“Two-thirds of all feature films ever made have been made since the turn of the millennium”
“I looked around the room which was rammed to the rafters and thought again that the numbers and the sentiment didn’t add up. If we all really agreed that this was over, why were we all there? A mass delusion?”
Netribution@25: month 1
25 years ago tonight Wendy Bevan-Mogg, Tom Fogg and I arrived at Dawn & Pete’s Peeping Toms Screening Night in Soho to unveil Netribution. This feels a time where some reflection may be helpful, so Tom and I have decided to make a 12 x monthly mini-…
Carnal memories
How Eric’s adventure to Glasgow gave Netribution’s Carnal Cinema an illustration for every (fake) interview.
“a light by which we could see each other better.” Remembering Leslie Lowes (James MacGregor)
“He had the warmth of a fire at the end of the world” Ben Blaine It’s impossible to forget Les’s voice. The crisp yet calm confidence from a career in BBC Radio, but anchored in County Durham bedrock. He remains the only writer I’ve known who…
Remembering Leslie Lowes
I met Leslie 20 years ago through Shooting People. We were both loud and opinionated voices and I think initially we argued, if only because initially I argued with everyone. Some took this to heart and seem to have considered me unpardonable ever s…
Netribution Revisited: an interview with my younger self.
I want to talk to the young man I was from across time. I want to remember. Let’s start at where I met Nic. We were studying film production at Westminster Uni…
The Ghosts of Futures Past
Reflections on 25 years since Nic Wistreich & Tom Fogg founded Netribution, and predictions for the next 25.
25 years of Netribution…
Netribution 1 grew in the fertile ashes of the dotcom crash – brimming with excitement about DV cameras and distributing films online. It turned 25 years old on New Years Eve. It wasn’t meant to be like this.