For those of you in San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Expo, I’m going to be speaking Friday in the main ballroom at 10:15 AM. Earlier that morning are Jonathan Schwartz, Dan Lyons, and Matt Cutts, all tough acts to follow. I’ll be doing a “High Order Bit” which means “short” and will be launching something.
SxSW Meetup
Reminder: WordPress meetup at SxSW. 78 signups so far, I’ll try to bring shirts. 🙂
Waterproof Powerbook
Thank good the bottom left of the Powerbook is mostly waterproof. (Well, lemonade-proof.)
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.
Translator Needed
LeWeb 2010 Talk
The talk Toni and I did with Alexia Tsotsis at LeWeb this year is now online, at the end we talk a bit about what’s next for Automattic in the WP world:
Also chatted with Hermione Way of The Next Web about the biggest tech story of the year.
minibb Abandons GPL
The miniBB authors are moving away from the GPL. This is what we use for our support forums. Perhaps now would be a good time to release my version.
Keyboard Chair
I wonder if one of these is actually comfortable, if it would work with my chair, and if I would be shunned from the non-geek community if they ever saw it.
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.
After the Deadline now Open Source
After the Deadline, the intelligent spell- and grammar-checking service Automattic acquired a few months ago, is releasing its core technology under the GPL. There’s also a new jQuery API that makes it easy to integrate with any textarea. Ostatic writes about it here.
WordPress Wii Plugin
WordPress Wii Edition Plugin, so you can browse your blog from the Wii browser. I’ve gotten a Wii and it’s definitely the device of the season, it doesn’t do as much as the PS3 or Xbox, but it’s way more fun.
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.
Firefox Wins
Firefox beat Internet Explorer in number of people accessing wordpress.org by about 80,000 in January. Of the people visiting with IE, over 90% were using 6.0. This makes web development much, much easier.
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!
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.
In Berlin
If there are any WordPress users that will be in Berlin next week drop me an email – matt at my last name dot com. 🙂
Next Generation CMS
WordPress + Textpattern = WordPattern. 😉 (Big kudos to the Textpattern folks.)
Chevy Nova
The story about the Chevy Nova not selling well in Mexico because its name meant “no go” is completely false.
WordPress 14
Today is 14 years from the very first release of WordPress. The interface I’m using to write this (Calypso) is completely unrecognizable from what WordPress looked and worked like even a few years ago. Fourteen years in, I’m waking up every day excited about what’s coming next for us. The progress of the editor and CLI so far this year is awesome, and I’m looking forward to that flowing into improvements for customization and the REST API. Thanks as always to Mike for kicking off this crazy journey, all the people chipping in to make WordPress better, and Konstantin and Erick for surprising me with the cool cake above.
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.