On Automattic's internal BuddyPress-powered company directory, we allow people to fill out a field saying how far their previous daily commute was. 509 people have filled that out so far, and they are saving 12,324 kilometers of travel every work day. Wow!
Athens with Social
I met up with Team Social from Automattic in Athens, Greece where they were having their meetup. This day included some injuries, the Acropolis, and a night out on the town.
WordPress & Techmeme 100
Whenever I visit a site I can usually tell whether it’s WordPress or not within an instant — there’s just something about a WordPress site that is distinctive. Super-clean permalinks are usually a dead giveaway. One thing I’ve been noticing a lot lately is on my guilty pleasure for tech news, Techmeme, it seems like almost every link I click is to a WordPress-powered site. Fortunately Techmeme provides a leaderboard showing both rank and % of space a site has taken up in headlines in the past thirty days.
The list changes almost every day but went ahead and took a snapshot of the top 100 as of January 16th and ran down the platform for each one, here’s how it ended up:
WordPress comes in at 43%, custom or bespoke systems at 42%, and then the others. When you take into effect Techmeme’s “presence” factor WP jumps to 48.8% of presence in the top 100 and all Blogsmith, Drupal, Blogspot, Tumblr, and Typepad combined are 8.4%. If you curious of the raw data, here’s the spreadsheet with the platforms.
This is just a snapshot, it’d be interesting to see how this evolves over time. It’s a small slice of the world of websites, but a very influential one. I’ve actually reached out to Gabe Rivera a few times to sponsor the leaderboard page, putting a W logo next to the ones that run WordPress in the table, but nothing has come of it yet.
Buenos Aires Day 3
Interview, dinner, drinks, mojitos mo’ problems. Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Tons of Plugins
The WP-Plugins.org developer plugin repository now has over 300 registered plugins. Time to get that directory going!
It’s Only Right
Friends don’t let friends do Livejournal. If you or anyone you know wants help setting up a blog, let me know. I’m trying to help as many people I know as possible get online and blogging. It’s the Right Thing to Do. Plus I have this big ’ol dedicated server running at less than 10% capacity.
Popups
There’s been a lot of talk about pop-unders that get by Firefox and Safari and I’ve seen them myself. The ones I’ve seen are using the technique I first saw on SitePoint, did the ad makers get some “fresh thinking for web developers and designers”?
Waterproof Powerbook
Thank good the bottom left of the Powerbook is mostly waterproof. (Well, lemonade-proof.)
Imposter
There is some joker wannabe hacker pretending to me and asking others for sensitive information. Here are some tell-tale signs: IMing from a misspelled version of my IM addresses, like “saxmat02”; emailing from a gmail account with my name; using bad English (more than I normally do); asking for passwords, etc. These are all things I’d never do. If you ever have any doubt that the person you’re talking to might not be me, just call me on my cell or use one of the other contact methods here.
Next Generation CMS
WordPress + Textpattern = WordPattern. 😉 (Big kudos to the Textpattern folks.)
Translator Needed
SxSW Meetup
Reminder: WordPress meetup at SxSW. 78 signups so far, I’ll try to bring shirts. 🙂
Chevy Nova
The story about the Chevy Nova not selling well in Mexico because its name meant “no go” is completely false.
More Tiger Secondary
It’s only been a few months since May when Tiger Global led a round purchasing about $50M of Automattic stock from existing shareholders, but they are back and have led a $75M purchase of Automattic stock, this time entirely from our early investor Polaris. (There were a few individuals in the first round, and ICONIQ joined investing in this round.)
Read also: Evelyn Rusli in the Wall Street Journal “Tiger Global Ups Investment in Creator of WordPress.com”.
Until now Polaris had been Automattic’s largest investor, and second largest shareholder. Mike Hirshland wrote the biggest checks in our 2006 and 2008 rounds (the only primary capital Automattic has raised) and served on our board until 2011 when he left the firm and we were lucky to be joined by Dave Barrett. Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of spending time and getting great feedback from a number of people associated with the firm including Ryan Spoon, Bob Metcalfe, Steve Arnold, and Alan Spoon. Although they’ll no longer be on the board Polaris will continue to be a major shareholder, retaining about a third of their stake. Now that Automattic has been locked in as a win for their portfolio I hope they’ll continue to be involved for many years to come.
I’m glad to be even more fully aligned with Tiger. I think it says a lot to their excitement in the company that just a few months after joining the family and learning more about the company they significantly increased their stake, and at a significant bump in valuation. Their deep resources, market experience, and long-term outlook make them an ideal partner for the next phase of Automattic and the continued growth of the WordPress ecosystem. What we’re building will take time and it won’t be easy, but things worth doing seldom are.
This news comes in a fun week generally: Scott Berkun’s book about Automattic is out today and getting rave reviews, WordPress.com just passed Yahoo in the US Quantcast rankings (and that doesn’t include custom mapped domains), we’re relaunching Simplenote for iOS 7 and Mac after the Android update last week, WordPress is on the cusp of cracking 20% of websites, we just announced a partnership with Eventbrite, and this Wednesday I’ll be on stage at GigaOM’s Structure Europe conference.
Hopefully I’ll see some of you there, and if you’d like to join in on the mission of democratizing publishing Automattic is hiring.
Metblogs
The new Metblogs looks fantastic. According to Jason all the cities are running on WordPress MU. Metblogs was one of the largest Movable Type installations I knew about, I’m honored to see them move to WP. Cities are the next big thing, I hear.
More Trackback Spam
Came across two interesting posts today Trackback spam a nightmare and Fighting Trackback spam. Although I appreciate the praise for all we’ve done thus far in WordPress to address these problems, I think we’ve got a lot left to do and this is still an area of very active development.
WordCamp Day Two, many clouds
A few pictures of day 2 of WordCamp; lots of Texas clouds, which are the prettiest in the world.
Advertising and Blogs
Podcast #2 is up, broadly about advertising and blogs. 2:30. The quality is still awful, I might still sound like a chipmunk if you play it in flash, but thanks for all the great suggestions on the post from yesterday, I’ll be trying them out over the next few days.
New Apartment
I’m sitting inside my new place in San Francisco. The weather is cold but I don’t feel it a bit. The water is hot, the internet is fast, and furniture should get here in a few days. What more do you need? I wish you all could see this big goofy grin on my face.