Category Archives: Asides

Interesting links.

Comscore Numbers

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?

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.

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.

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 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.