Travel to NYC, dinner and drinks for St. Patrick’s day.
Around the Garden
Around the garden at my parents’ house.
Christian Lander on SWPL
Stuff White People Like’s Christian Lander: The Heeb Interview, a short interview with the fellow behind the now-famous SWPL (hosted on WordPress.com, naturally), which has already spawned copycats.
Drinks and Pie Fight at Rice
Met Richard Yoo, had mexican food and drinks with friends, and wandered around Rice into a pie fight.
New Gravatar
The rewrite of Gravatar from Ruby to PHP is done. The backend should be identical, the serving of Gravatars should be even faster, and as a bonus we now support SSL Gravatars.
Family at Brookwood
Lunch at Brookwood Community, exploring the grounds and flowers, Mom’s birthday dinner.
WordPress is Open Source
Six Apart has recently decided that the best way to win back customers fleeing their platforms is to target WordPress, which is a new strategy they call competing. (What have they been doing the past 7 years?) A good example is this exchange between a commenter on Valleywag and Byrne Reese, the lead developer of Movable Type:
Sundown: “@anildash: what part of WordPress is not open source?”
byrnereese: “@Sunnduwn – I think that is a question better asked of Automattic. Anil, and certainly not Six Apart, has never been briefed, nor has anyone for that matter been presented with an accounting of what is open and closed source at Automattic.”
Okay, here’s some accounting:
WordPress is 100% open source, GPL.
All plugins in the official directory are GPL or compatible, 100% open source.
bbPress is 100% GPL.
WordPress MU is 100% open source, GPL, and if you wanted you could take it and build your own hosted platform like WordPress.com, like edublogs.org has with over 100,000 blogs.
There is more GPL stuff on the way, as well. 🙂
Could you build Typepad or Vox with Movable Type? Probably not, especially since people with more than a few blogs or posts say it grinds to a halt, as Metblogs found before they switched to WordPress.
Automattic (and other people) can provide full support for GPL software, which is the single license everything we support is under. Movable Type has 8 different licenses and the “open source” one doesn’t allow any support. The community around WordPress is amazing and most people find it more than adequate for their support needs.
Movable Type, which is Six Apart’s only Open Source product line now that they’ve dumped Livejournal, doesn’t even have a public bug tracker, even though they announced it going OS over 9 months ago!
I had held off criticizing them after they went OS and before they decided to start an all-out confrontation because that’s not generally what OS projects do to each other.
For as long as I can remember the WordPress about page has linked and thanked Movable Type for ideas and inspiration.
Movable Type once led the market, it had over 90% marketshare in the self-hosted market. Now they call “pages” and “dynamic publishing”, features WordPress has had for 4+ years, innovation and you still can’t do basic things like click “next posts” at the bottom of home page.
For the record, I’m glad they’ve taken the license of MT in a positive direction that prevents them from betraying their customers like they did with MT3, but they have a long way to go before the project could be considered a community.
WordPress did 3 major releases last year, we’ll do 3 major releases this year. Along the way thousands of people will contribute, as well as every employee of Automattic. What we build will be greater than the sum of its parts because we’ve been a community and open source from the beginning, and always will be.
Charleen’s car, Texas Sunset
In Texas — sunset, armadillo with beer, Charleen’s car.
Interview with Pop17
SxSW Day Three
Moblogic.tv party, wandering around SxSW booths, awesome bowling with Team Automattic + Friends.
SxSW Day 2
A hamburger place for lunch, the 16-bit party, and a human-powered cab home.
SxSW Day One
My pictures from day one of SxSW.
WP at eBay
eBay has a new WordPress blog. Hat tip: Jonathan Dingman.
At SxSW
I’m at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas now. This is my fifth year at the conference, and I’m excited as ever to see what this year holds. I’m on two panels this year. If you’re a WordPress user and you spot me at the conference please introduce yourself! I’ll try to keep some WP stickers on me, so ask for one if you don’t have one on your laptop yet.
SxSW Day 0
Travel from San Francisco to Austin and dinner at IHOP with Glenda and my sister.
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.
House and Baby
Some snaps around my apartment with Lea, Hege, and her beautiful new baby.
Backing BuddyPress
Some of you may remember when I wrote about Chickspeak, a WordPress MU-based social network. Andy Peatling, the fellow behind it, later decided to recreate the work he had done as an Open Source effort he called BuddyPress. And it was good.
Today I’m happy to announce that Andy has joined Automattic full-time and we’ll be taking the BuddyPress project under our wing. We will grow it and support it the same way we support WordPress, MU, bbPress, Akismet, and more.
It’s clear that the future is social. Connections are key. WordPress MU is a platform which has shown itself to be able to operate at Internet-scale and with BuddyPress we can make it friendlier. Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape.
See also: DiSo, GigaOM, Techcrunch, Mashable, Techvibes.
VC Mike and Automattic
Automattic Connection talks a bit about the history of Automattic from the point of view of Mike Hirshland, aka VC Mike.
Percentage of Splogs
I’ve been indicated a few places saying a third of blogs are spam. Someone came up with this by me saying we’ve axed around 800,000 splogs on WordPress.com, and looking at our number of blogs, which is 2.5m.
As for percentage of the total blogosphere, reported by Technorati as north of 100 million, which are splogs, I’d say the number is much higher – probably 80%. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, I just think spammers are very effective at creating hundreds of thousands to millions of blogs, they tend to stick around, and I feel like Technorati’s number doesn’t doesn’t adequately scrub these out.
While I’m making data-less estimates, I’d say there are about 25-30 million non-spam blogs, and about 8-14 million of those are active in terms of getting traffic or new posts. You could cover a meaningful portion of the blogosphere by just indexing 4 or 5 million blogs.
Splogs and blogger attrition are two problems no one really talks about, but that’s okay because I don’t think either is hindering anyone’s growth as measured by metrics that matter, like pageviews or uniques. (Though many of the services supporting so many splogs must have an inordinate amount of resources devoted to them.)
See also: Blog Ping and Spam Statistics, WordPress.com February wrap-up.