This snippet from the Wall Street Journal shows the Comscore numbers for the top social media sites, show us about 22 million ahead of Flickr and “Six Apart Sites” (which I think is Livejournal/Typepad/Vox combined) but about 9 million behind Facebook. I think the reason they say N/A for our growth is because a year ago we weren’t even tracked by Comscore. We’re too cheap for a subscription though, maybe someone with one can check that?
Category Archives: Asides
Gravatar Sold
Automattic has bought Gravatar. Om sees it as a larger trend, but to us it was just a good fit.
Rails Bashing
Since 7 reasons I switched back to PHP there seems to be a trend of Rails-bashing articles, epitomized by this one which is a fine example of the form until it advocates ASP.NET. Through it all, I still haven’t heard of a startup or web service that failed or succeeded due solely to its web framework or language. These articles are like the celebrity gossip stories of Web 2.0, complete with ad hominem attacks, and just as useless. Hacker News tends to be a fairly high signal source of discussions actually relevant to startups.
Guardian Interview
When I was in London I had the chance to chat with Tim Anderson who in turn wrote an article in yesterday’s Guardian, WordPress makes a stand for open source morality, which is worth a read. We also got a mention in the same issue in The office of the future is all around by Victor Keegan.
Number of Features
Months of Work
FOWA Slides
I put the slides from my presentation up on Slideshare. They’re pretty sparse, so if you’re looking to catch up on the talk I’d suggest waiting until Carsonified uploads the audio or video.
London / FOWA WordPress Meetup
As per the comments on my last post the WordPress London Meetup will be on Thursday October 4th right after the PHP London meetup. The venue is called The Old Crown and it looks like the perfect spot, it even has wifi. I have to take the DLR from the Docklands into town so I’m planning to be there at 9 PM, which is when the PHP presentations should be finishing up and we can stage a WordPress invasion. If someone could post DLR / Tube instructions to get there from the Excel Center where FOWA is I think a lot of people would appreciate it.
WordCamp Israel
There is a WordCamp Israel being organized. There is an English blog covering the event.
Multipart HTTP
WordPress.com Rising
WordPress.com is now the number #22 site in the US according to Quantcast, just ahead of craigslist.org. Moving up from there is going to be a lot harder as the US uniques get pretty big. Note that the numbers Quantcast uses for its top-list only includes blogs with “wordpress.com” in the URL. To see our aggregate stats which includes blogs with custom domains you have to look at the WordPress network page, which has us at 87 million global uniques in the past 30 days, up from 70 million just over a month ago.
Paris Meetup Today
Sorry for the short notice, but I lost track of time yesterday and we ended staying out pretty late. The Paris meetup today will be small and casual because of the late notice, but I’ll be at Cafe Beaubourg from 6-8pm with Tony Conrad of Sphere. We’ll try to sit in a visible location, I’ll be wearing a dark grey hoodie and jeans, and I’ll probably have my laptop out. 🙂
Paris and London WordPress Meetups
I’m going to be in Europe next week to speak at the Future of Web Apps in London, and I’ll be spending a few days in Paris beforehand. I’d love to meet up with WordPress-minded folks in both. Let’s do a Paris meetup on Sunday, September 30th and one in London on Tuesday the 2nd or Thursday the 4th. Leave a comment (with your email) if you can make it and we’ll nail down the details in the next day or two.
AirPress
WordPress Plugin Stats
Our official WordPress plugin directory now lists some stats at the top, as of right now there are 1,021 active plugins and they’ve gotten 1,597,994 downloads. Wowza!
Leo Laporte
I missed it at the time, but Leo Laporte has switched to WordPress as his primary blogging platform.
San Francisco Upgrade Party
Foundread Public Square
Foundread, a great site for entrepreneurs from the GigaOM crew, has switched to WordPress.com from Public Square. Public Square is a CMS from Cucina Media that most famously powers the information architecture site Boxes and Arrows, which I believe was previously run on Drupal.
Blog Interview
I was interviewed on Blog Interviewer, there’s audio with a transcription.
CNET TV Live
Sorry for the late notice, but I’ll be on CNET TV at 1 PM PST.