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.

Ma.tt Themes Released

Asides

As I announced today at WordCamp Savannah, I’m releasing two of my old designs as themes for any WordPress blog. (See slides here.) If you’re one of the thousands of people who’ve asked me how I do my galleries here on this site, now you can look at the actual code in the Matala theme. (The talavera-looking design by Nicolò Volpato.) The second theme, Mazeld, is actually the last from-scratch original design I did here on Ma.tt (then photomatt.net) and is built as a 2010 child theme. Both themes are listed in the WordPress.org theme directory and available for download. This is just the first iteration, so expect some updates within the next few months as we iterate on the code and functionality.

I Miss School

Essays, Personal

Just like they say youth is wasted on the young, I think I squandered school when I was in it. The idea of having no responsibilities except general edification seems like such a luxury now. When I had it all I wanted to do was hack around on the web. Now that the vast majority of my hours are hacking around on the web, it’s a huge luxury to just sit and read for a bit.

Part of that, for me, has been learning how much I don’t know. My search for learning in the past few years is why I’ve attended so many conferences. Events are usually a terrible medium for communicating information, at least how most of them are run, and most of their value is human connections. In the past years I’ve been to a few TED-style ones that were entertaining in their fast-paced format (15-20 minutes per presentation, musical or theatrical fluff to break dense ones up) and the curiosity they sparked by nature of being short and incomplete: TEDMED and EG. The format does become tiresome and exhausting after a while though, too short, and like pizza I appreciate the talks more once they’re on TED.com. (TED has one of the best post-conference experiences, and a big inspiration for WordPress.tv. Also check out FORA.tv which also has amazing content.)

So while events are a brief hit, most of my pleasure from learning comes these days from books and highly interlinked websites. Wikipedia is the canonical example, it can be so blissful to be lost in a web of great content, like a choose-your-own-adventure of information, stumbling from link to link and always ending up someplace you didn’t expect.

I wonder if there could be some sort of metric for writing that told you the ratio of time-to-create versus time-to-consume. On Twitter it’s basically 1:1, you can craft and consume a tweet in a time measured in seconds. For this blog post, it may take me an hour to write it and 5 minutes to read (not skim) it. You can work your way all the way up through 8-10,000 word essays, and books that may take years and years (or a lifetime) to create. The higher the ratio, the more potential for learning and self-improvement. (I wonder how you would measure the Wikipedia which has taken lots of people a little time.) I could easily spend four hours a day surfing hundreds of posts in Google Reader, most of them that took a few minutes to create. It’s a sugar-rush of content that crashes after an hour or two and leaves me empty and hungry. A great novel or book feeds my soul. That’s why I love the Kindle — it has helped me read again.

Google Penalizing Paid Links

Asides, ,

Now that Google is officially penalizing paid links, I’m glad the WordPress community took such a strong stand against them in themes. Countless blogs could have been penalized just for the theme they were using, not related to anything they did or did not do on their blog. It was a tough decision at the time, it probably drew more criticism and personal attacks against me than anything we’ve done before, but time has proved us right.

This is Real Broadband

Personal,

Really fat bandwidth graph

Care of VVD Communications, the cool company with a bad website, I now have a synchronous 10mbps connection in my apartment. The first thing I did was go to a bandwidth testing site, as seen above. I was using Comcast before which was pretty snappy, but this is a whole new way to experience the internet. This is even faster than the connection I get at work.

This will definitely mean I’ll be able to run a lot more things from home, the upload bandwidth is about 10x what I had before, which means it’ll be much faster to upload pictures, serve files, stream music from home, and all the other stuff you should be able to do in a hyperconnected world. (Maybe I’ll even catch up on photos now.) They were also able to light up all the ethernet panels in my place so now doing some of the multimedia things I wanted to do around the house should be much easier. (Wireless was really too slow.) Best of all, the whole thing is only $35 a month and there was no setup.

I’m still going to have Comcast for a few months until my contract runs out, what I’m wondering now is if there’s a way to have the router balance the internet traffic between the two connections. I’m using a WRT54GS which I’ve loaded up with alternative Linux-based firmware before with good success. I wonder if that sort of balancing would be possible?

New Kindle

Asides

There’s a new Kindle out, which I just ordered. I love the Kindle — even more than the iPhone 4. On my iPhone I do the same stuff I do on my computer, just mobile. The Kindle helps me to read and my life has been more enhanced by books than any other medium I’ve experienced. I’ve bought probably 10 since they came out for me, friends, and family, and sold 100+ to other people. (Before the Kindle came out I randomly got a demo of it from Jeff Bezos at the EG Conference, and it was love at first sight.)

Announcement Part 1

Personal

So I guess now is as good a time as any for the first annoucement I’ve been promising: In a couple of days I’m going to be driving cross-country to San Francisco and settle down there. I was in SF the past few days to find a place and I found something that’s perfect for me. This is a permanent relocation, though I’m sure I’ll be back to Texas often. (As often as I can. I love TX. :)) Loose ends have been tied, phone plan has been changed, life is in order. I’m going to miss my people and family in Houston very dearly, but I’m still incredibly excited about the move.

If you live on the route between Houston and San Francisco drop me a note and maybe we can meet up on my trip.

A Foot of Mac

Uncategorized

I broke down:

Three retail boxes, one for Keynote software, one for a 12 inch Powerbook, one for an iPod

Now I’m just walking around with a big goofy grin on my face. First thoughts:

  • I cannot tab in forms like I used to
  • Enter lets you change the filename instead of drilling down
  • The aliasing of the fonts looks funny at first but you get used to it
  • It’s faster than my Vaio
  • Things are very intuitive (e.g., setting up my bluetooth mouse)
  • iSync rocks
  • Setting up my phone as a GPRS modem was not intuitive.
  • I want something like Putty
  • 256MB of memory is not enough
  • I’m getting used the quirks pretty quickly
  • I keep hitting the trackpad when I’m typing and erasing stuff

It’s not a total switch, I still have Windows XP on a laptop and a desktop that I use daily, and my Gentoo desktop has been running very well. This is just getting my feet wet on a new platform, and greatly expanding my testing enviroment. A big part of my motivation was that a grossly disproportionate part of my audience (about one in six) is on OS X, a platform that I previously had no easy way to test on.

I would love to hear software recommendations and general tips and tricks. One thing I really miss is I used to have shortcut keys that would launch putty SSH sessions to different servers and use key authentication so I didn’t have to type anything, about 5 of them, and not having that is actually slowing me down a lot.

Back Online

WordPress

I called my sister last night to tell her about a present I found for her in the market and she interrupted me to say she saw my name show up in Google News a few times and started reading some of the articles. Before the phone card ran out she read me some headlines and my stomach sank. This is my first vacation and I almost didn’t even bring my laptop. (Luckily I talked myself into bringing it to do pictures.) I haven’t been on the internet since Monday and I obviously have a lot to catch up on. It was almost midnight when I found out and there was no access anywhere, so I woke up at 4:30 AM this morning to catch the first water bus to the airport and found some overpriced wifi, and here I am.

I have close to a thousand emails and countless blog posts and comments to go through, but I’ll try to synthesize everything and respond ASAP, I think it’s important because some people seem to be spinning things quite maliciously. If you have a specific question please send me an email and I’ll do my best to respond personally or on the blog, even if you’ve already decided I’m the scum of the earth.

State of the Word 2011

WordPress

Just in case you missed yesterday’s State of the Word presentation, it’s now available on WordPress TV:

The slides are also available on Slideshare.

Here are some key takeaways from yesterday:

  • We had over 1,000 people attending WCSF and many more watching the livestream, making it the biggest WordCamp yet.
  • The survey of 18,000 WP users revealed some interesting data, like a median hourly rate of $50 and that 6,800 of the self-employed respondents were responsible for over 170,000 sites personally.
  • WordPress 3.2 had 500,000 downloads in the first two days, representing the fastest upgrade velocity ever.
  • WordPress now has 15,000 plugins and 200 million plugin downloads, and we’re doing a lot of work to make the plugin experience more seamless.
  • 14.7 percent of the top million websites in the world use WordPress.
  • 22 of every 100 active domains created in the U.S. are running WordPress.

In true WordPress fashion, we’ll be open sourcing the raw survey data so people can slice and dice it their own way to find interesting trends or patterns, like breaking down the hourly rates by geography.

Special thanks to Pete Davies, who was responsible for the survey and helping craft the narrative of the keynote, and Michael Pick who did the same and also designed all the slides and animations you saw. Michael is going to prepare a blog post with all of the inspirations and allusions in the slides for those of you curious about the story behind the design.

Update: Raw data and a few other updates are now available on WordPress.org.

Automattic After-Market, Lee Fixel, and Tiger

Automattic

One of the most striking shifts in entrepreneurship when I started Automattic seven years ago was the rise of the Founder Friendly VCs. The standard operating procedure at the time for VC-backed companies consisted of bringing in “adult supervision,” founders often taking largely-ceremonial roles like “chief architect” after the business had scaled to a certain point, aggressive financial terms around liquidation preferences, and a control structure that more often than not left founders with a minority say in the future of the company, especially if it went through rough patches. Folks like True Ventures (who Automattic has always been intertwined with) appeared as iconoclasts because they came out saying that founders were the best ones to grow a company long-term and structuring their entire practice and way of investing around that idea. It seems non-controversial now, but it was like Dylan going electric. Still in spite of their philosophical innovations, many of these funds were structured in similar ways to the ones of old, with 7-10 year fund lifetimes, for example.

Fast-forward to 2013 and there’s an even more founder-friendly class of investors rising, at least for companies that have made it past a certain exit velocity of growth and revenue. Most visibly pioneered by Yuri Milner and Facebook in 2009 there’s a breed of later-stage investors from largely financial backgrounds that come in with the ability to write checks larger than the entire size of most VC funds and a desire to align with founders so strong that they embrace things that even VCs from the founder-friendly cohort would balk at: forgoing board seats, assigning voting proxies to founders, taking very long term approaches to growth, and investing in (and seeking out!) companies outside of the California/New York bubble, from South Africa to Russia to Brazil. The most interesting thing to me about this new generation is how behind the scenes they are: forget about a blog or Twitter, most of these guys don’t even have websites for their firms. These are some of the smartest and most successful people you’ll ever meet and you’ll never hear about them… they like it that way. Asymmetric information is their core competitive advantage.

Anyway, wanted to get in front of the news that will inevitably come out in the next week or two: there has been a large secondary transaction in Automattic stock, about $50M worth. “Secondary” means that it’s existing stockholders, like the earliest investors or employees, selling stock to another investor versus money going into the company (“primary”). It was led by Lee Fixel at Tiger Global, one of the behind-the-scenes quiet geniuses that has previously invested in SurveyMonkey, Facebook, LinkedIn, Palantir, Square, Warby Parker… Automattic is healthy, generating cash, and already growing as fast as it can so there’s no need for the company to raise money directly — we’re not capital constrained. The minority of stockholders that elected to participate are holding on to the vast majority of their shares. We’re building an independent company that’s going to be a growing part of the fabric of the web for many years to come, so allowing early investors to lock in some returns releases any short-term pressure there might be on the company for a liquidity event and allows us to focus fully on the long road ahead.

As sometimes happens in with regulated financial things, I can’t answer every question about this, but will leave comments open. I hope to see some of you on Monday the 27th when I’ll be celebrating the 10th anniversary of WordPress alongside community members in over 500 cities. Also check out Toni’s post about all of the above. If you’re interested in living anywhere and working hard alongside people passionate about the same, Automattic is always hiring.

Blogging Drift

WordPress

The New York Times has a pretty prominent article today called Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter. The title was probably written by an editor, not the author, because as soon as the article gets past the two token teenagers who tumble and Facebook instead of blogging, the stats show all the major blogging services growing — even Blogger whose global “unique visitors rose 9 percent, to 323 million,” meaning it grew about 6 Foursquares last year alone. (In the same timeframe WordPress.com grew about 80 million uniques according to Quantcast.)

Blogging has legs — it’s been growing now for more than a decade, but it’s not a “new thing” anymore. Underneath the data in the article there’s an interesting super-trend that the Times misses: people of all ages are becoming more and more comfortable publishing online. If you’re reading this blog you probably know the thrill of posting and getting feedback is addictive, and once you have a taste of that it’s hard to go back. You rode a bike before you drove a car, and both opened up your horizons in a way you hadn’t imagined before. That’s why blogging just won’t quit no matter how many times it’s declared dead.

Blogging (with WordPress) is the natural evolution of the lighter publishing methods — at some point you’ll have more to say than fits in 140 characters, is too important to put in Facebook’s generic chrome, or you’ve matured to the point you want more flexibility and control around your words and ideas. (As The Daily What did in their recent switch from Tumblr to WordPress.) You don’t stop using the lighter method, you just complement it — different mediums afford different messages.

Read more: Scott Rosenberg on “Another misleading story”; Mark Evans “Why I Still Love Blogging.”

Israeli Security Hates iPad

Asides, ,

I had a pretty interesting experience going through security at Ben Gurion airport — I almost didn’t make it through. I had heard the airport security in Israel was different but I had no idea. They spent about an hour asking questions, turning on (and taking apart) every piece of the 20+ electronic items I travel with, with particular attention and questions around my iPad. They took it out of the Apple case, turned it on, scanned it, took it away for 10 minutes to scan somewhere else, asked if anyone else in Israel had used it, when I last used it, asked when I got it, and ultimately said that their “technology team” had not cleared it for carry-on and they would need to pack it in a special box, wrap it, tape it, and check it directly with Continental (I couldn’t touch it or the box except to put some WP stickers on so I could identify it later). Wowza! My Sony PC, though, is safe to fly with. No wonder I saw so few Apple products at WordCamp. 🙂

Why Your Company Should Have a Creed

Essays

Does your company have a creed? Twice a year, True Ventures (one of Automattic’s investors) organizes an event called Founders’ Camp, a one-day conference for the founders and CEOs of companies in their portfolio. The latest was held in the Automattic Lounge at Pier 38 in San Francisco (it could be the last).

There was an interesting conversation led by Ethan Diamond, Alex Bard, Howard Lindzon, and Narendra Rocherolle on the importance of culture in an organization and how it gets formed. Despite its importance, “culture” is one of those fuzzy things that’s difficult for many founders, especially men, to discuss earnestly.  Even though I have extremely strong opinions about company culture, I find it feels “corny” to talk about it directly. Nevertheless, as part of the discussion, I shared the following practical example from Automattic about something we did to codify and share our values.

It started innocently enough — someone copied me when they emailed their paperwork to accept a job offer. For the first time in a while I looked at the offer letter and realized that it read like a bad generic legal template: no branding; terrible typography; the most important information (start date, salary, stock options) buried under a sea of text; and, worst of all, it was being sent out in .docx format (especially embarrassing for a company whose foundation is Open Source). The offer didn’t reflect who we were, how we worked, and certainly not how we thought about design and user experience.

Nick and MT of the Janitorial team at Automattic designed new documents and worked out a clever way to have a web form on our intranet generate the pages as HTML. It has some extra goodies like vector signatures. Anybody sending a contract or offer can create a PDF out of that web page, and email the document out to the recipient. Everything is logged and tracked. (As a bonus our legal templates for employees and contractors are now tracked in SVN along with the rest of our code.)

Finally, as a hack to introduce new folks to our culture, we put a beta “Automattic Creed”, basically a statement of things important to us, written in the first person. We put it after the legal gobbledygook and before the signature area; if you chose to accept the offer, you’d sign your name next to the values before starting work. This seemed like a powerful statement and might affect people’s perceptions in the same way that putting signatures at the top of forms increases honesty.

That was around the beginning of May last year, and everyone who has joined since then (about half the company) has gotten the creed in their offer letter. The feedback from the beta was excellent and later that same month we added the creed to the home page of our Automattic Field Guide (our internal reference site), where it still lives today with a link to a recent discussion about what the creed means in practice.

Adding the creed before the signature block ended up being an easy change that had a big impact on the company.

A fair number of founders at the event have asked what the creed is. If you’re curious here it is (as of September 19th, 2011):

I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.

I’m sure that it will evolve in the future, just as Automattic and WordPress will. If you’re building a startup or any sort of organization, take a few moments to reflect on the qualities that the people you most enjoy working with embody and the user experience of new people joining your organization, from the offer letter to their first day.

Of course if you’d like to see the above in an offer letter, consider applying for Automattic.

If you write a creed for your company or non-profit after reading this, please leave it in the comments!