Category Archives: WordPress

The open source publishing platform I co-founded — development, releases, community, and the ecosystem.

Micro-blogging vs Mega-blogging

WordPress

I don’t think “mega-blogging” is actually a thing, I just made it up to make the title sound more dramatic. But if mega-blogging were a thing, you would do it with WordPress. Micro-blogging is a thing, and a lot of people do it with Twitter.

TechCrunch drops in this fray with an article comparing the comScore numbers of WordPress.com and Twitter.com, which show an accelerating growth for WP.com and flattening for Twitter. I’ll talk about the data itself later, but first wanted to point out a point many overlook when trying to create a battle between the mediums.

New forms of social media, including micro-blogging, are complementary to blogging.

One of the many uses of Twitter is to link to and promote your blog posts. (And other people’s blog posts.) As we grow, so do they, and vice versa. I blog when I have something longer to say, like this. I tweet when it’s the lowest friction way to talk to my friends, or get distribution for something longer I did somewhere else.

It’s not really a “versus,” it’s an “and.”

Whether the Twitter team intended it or not, they’ve built a killer and highly addictive reader platform with dozens of interesting UIs on top of it.

Features like WP.me, post by email, Twitter publicize, RSS Cloud, P2, email subscriptions, and more stuff in the cooker is trying to tie these things together more because people who do one are highly likely to do another.

As for the accuracy of underlying comScore data I would say they probably are precise but not accurate, meaning that whatever flaws they have in collection now, for example for WP.com they don’t count the custom domains or RSS readers and for Twitter they don’t count API usage or desktop clients, they’re at least self-consistent in how they do things over time. Some months they show us flat our internal stats showed growth, and vice versa. Ultimately it’s not worth anyone outside of comScore arguing how they collect their data, it’s better just to use it as one reference point alongside Quantcast (my fav), Alexa, Google Trends, Nielsen…

How tweets get imported into a blog is still an open question for me. I’ve seen lots of ways people have attempted it but when a blog becomes an activity stream it becomes a weak version of all the things it aggregates, less than the sum of its parts, because of the loss of context.

Published on CNN

Automattic, Meta, WordPress

Today a short piece “10 blogs to make you think” I wrote for CNN.com was published. I’m pretty excited about this and I also hope it drives a new audience to the blogs I mentioned, though to be fair if you’re not fascinated by how technology is changing society my picks might not be interesting. It’s a short piece in a “top ten” format, but I put a lot of thought into curating the picks.

I started blogging because I love writing. While the nature of Automattic is such that I’m writing all day long to communicate with my colleagues but writing for communication is different from the state of mind you’re in when you sit down to tell a story or change someone’s perspective. (Though perhaps it shouldn’t be.)

I started blogging for writing, I kept blogging for comments. It turns out what I love isn’t the act of writing itself, which has never come easy to me, but the conversation that happens afterward. Collectively in tech we become infatuated with each new medium be it blogs, widgets, social networks, micro-blogs, but in the end it always comes back to people talking to each other and eventually the novelty of the format fades.

As a final note when I write now I go into the WordPress editor because I know the auto-save will make sure my text is always safe, it produces clean and simple HTML, and I lean on After the Deadline. (Which now helps you rock the diaeresis New Yorker-style.)

10 Blogs to Make You Think

Essays, WordPress

This article also ran on CNN.

There are a hundred million blogs in the world, and it’s part of my job as the co-founder of WordPress to help as many people start blogging as possible. I think we’re doing pretty well on that front, but it does mean that sometimes it feels overwhelming to wade through them all and find the blogs that will be informative, entertaining, or whatever it is you’re looking for.  Sometimes you might feel it’s like TV — you have a thousand channels but nothing good is on. If you want to take a dip into the blogosphere, here are ten eclectic blog picks that, if nothing else, will make you think (or at least, they make me think):

1. Scripting News is the blog of Dave Winer, the father of many technologies that are crucial to the web. Dave writes every day and you’re as likely to read about something intensely personal he’s going through, like the passing of his father, as you are to read about the real-time web.

2. Open… by Glyn Moody covers the application of Open Source thinking to fields as wide-ranging as politics, genomics, content, and of course, software.

3. Scott Berkun is a former Microsoftie who has graduated to being one of most erudite authors on innovation, creativity, management, and now public speaking. He’s like a modern-day Peter Drucker.

4. Raw Thought from Aaron Swartz is a diverse blog from a deep thinker and troublemaker. The former is evidenced by his New Yorker-length treatise on John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory, while the latter is shown in his posted FBI file (you can request yours).

5. Philip Greenspun posts “every day; an interesting idea every three months.” See how a successful startup founder and engineer thinks about his post-startup life, taxes, helicopters, and photography.

6. Tim Ferriss is best known for his best-seller The Four Hour Workweek, but I’m most impressed by his blog on “lifestyle design,” or basically taking an analytical approach to your health and happiness.

7. Paul Graham, also a successful startup founder, has transformed into a philosophical leader of entrepreneurs. He espouses his view through thoughtful essays (linked) and invests in aspiring entrepeneurs through Y Combinator.

8. The Official Dreamhost Weblog is probably the most interesting blog from a company, ever. Each entry floats and wanders through vaguely inappropriate language and visual non-sequiturs before finally bringing you back home in a way you couldn’t have predicted; it’s more crazy than corporate.

9. Signals vs. Noise is another company blog, this one from 37 Signals, but at its core is an ongoing argument for simplicity in all things: design, code, and culture.

10. XKCD is daily comic that you’ll never find in a newspaper — it’s too smart, too honest, too web. For an extra bonus, hover your mouse over the image and see a hidden caption.

11. And though it’s not a blog, check out Werner Vogel’s Twitter to get insight into the mind of the CTO of one of the most innovative technology companies in the world, Amazon.

Automattic Aquires AtD

Automattic, WordPress,

Automattic just purchased a company and service called After the Deadline, an amazingly smart contextual spelling and grammar checker, and can catch errors even the New York Times misses. It’s now live for 7.5 million WordPress.com blogs and available as a free plugin for .org users, it replaces the built-in spell checker on TinyMCE. It’s a cool story, they were actually rejected from Y Combinator and a few other seed funds but kept at it anyway, and has now found a home in the Automattic family. I found out about the service from Hacker News.

Open City Data

Events, WordPress

Yesterday I was part of a press conference by Mayor Gavin Newsom promoting DataSF.org, which is one of San Francisco’s first steps at opening up. Tim O’Reilly also spoke and made the point to me afterward that as he dives deep into every part of the intersection of technology and government he’s most excited about the prospect for change at the city level. Here are some pictures from the event. I think we’ll see more along these lines, and more WordPress, for San Francisco in the future.

Not Lonely at All

Essays, Events, WordPress,

Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software wrote a blog post called Getting Pretty Lonely and and says, among other things, “Whenever I am reminded that WordPress is GPL, my passion for it takes a bit of a dive. I’m more comfortable with the true freedom of liberally-licensed products.” More importantly, he says that “GPL stifles participation,” and implies the same for adoption. The article was linked by John Gruber at Daring Fireball saying, “Smart essay from Daniel Jalkut on how the GPL discourages participation from many (if not most) developers.”

For what it’s worth, from my practical experience in the WordPress world:

  1. I’ve never encountered a serious client who chose not to use WordPress because it was GPL-licensed, and I think it’s hard to argue that WordPress’s license has had a dampening effect on its adoption, given its success over competitors with widely varying licenses.
  2. I think we have an incredibly strong third-party extension, plugin, and theme community that has flourished, not in spite of the GPL license, but because of it.
  3. I’ve seen the absence of GPL in practice; there have been times in the WordPress world when parts of the community have “gone dark” and claimed their code was under more restrictive licenses, like used to be common with themes. Every time this cycle starts it basically kills innovation in that part of the WordPress world until people start opening up their code again or until a GPL equivalent is available. I’ve seen this firsthand several times now.

WordPress first used the GPL because it was built on an existing GPL project (b2). Later I began to really understand the philosophical underpinnings of the GPL and understood it to be the most moral of the open source licenses. Now, in addition to that, my experience over the past 6 years has made me believe it to be the best license for practical purposes as well.

GPL was a license written for a different time and on the web it’s possible to find a thousand loopholes and ways around it (see: software as a service) but if you keep in mind the core freedoms and principles — share and share alike — they provide excellent guidelines for building a rich community and ecosystem: the two things that ultimately have far more to do with product success than the license. (Competitors to WP have switched to the GPL from proprietary licenses with basically no effect. License does not equal community, it’s a lot harder than that.)

Ultimately Daniel’s article falls apart on two levels, the first illustrated in a comment I left on the post:

Your biggest fallacy is “the liberal-license communities are attractive to developers from all 3 camps.”

I’m a GPL-friendly developer that is hesitant to be involved with a non-GPL project the same way your “passion for it takes a bit of a dive” when coming into contact with the GPL.

You could also make a fairly good argument that the majority of Open Source developers are GPL-friendly simply because the vast majority of Open Source projects are licensed under the GPL.

The common-knowledge number seems to be about 70% of open source projects are under the GPL and (more importantly) many of the most crucial and successful ones are. If Gruber’s “many (if not most) developers” avoid the GPL, maybe those folks aren’t that important. (In reality I think the majority of developers aren’t strongly influenced by licenses as long as they’re open source, something Daniel seems to agree with, saying “the vast majority of developers will participate in any project that is advantageous to them.”)

But more importantly, Mr Jalkut conflates what he perceives as his freedom as a developer with freedom from a user’s point of view. The things the GPL “takes away” from him, like being able to license his derivatives under a more restrictive license, are in fact protecting the freedoms of the users of his code. That’s who the GPL was written for. From the Free Software Definition:

Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software […]

It’s user freedom that the GPL was created to protect, just like the Bill of Rights was created to protect the people, not the President. The GPL introduces checks and balances into an incredibly imbalanced power dynamic, that between a developer and his/her product’s users. The only thing the GPL says you can’t do is take away the rights of your users in your work or something derived from a GPL project, that the user rights are unalienable. You are free to do pretty much whatever you want as long as it does not infringe on the freedoms of others. (Sound familiar?)

That’s what software freedom means to me, and it’s something I believe in strongly enough to fight for and defend even when it’s not the easy or popular thing to do. (Especially this weekend as we celebrate the original “fork” of the US from England.)

See also: Alex King — Breaking News WordPress is GPL.