WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has given his 2011 State of the Word address, and the state of the word is strong. Nearly 15% of the world's websites are powered by WordPress, up from 8.5% last year. For every 100 new active domains in the U.S., 22 of them run the popular open-source blogging software.
Mullenweg's address at the WordCamp conference in San Francisco this week goes through the history of the WordPress user interface, showing how its features developed over time and were then pared down to today's minimal, efficient design. With its frequent adjustments to UI and its healthy market for ready-made and custom themes and plug-ins, WordPress' user friendliness is key to its broad and rapid adoption by content creators. But this year, WordPress conducted its first user and developer survey, receiving over 18,000 responses, and it found a thriving economy for developers and site administrators as well.
Putting social media on autopilot is very seductive, but is it a good idea?
Blog publishing platform WordPress announced this afternoon that its users can now automatically cross-post links to their new blog posts to a Facebook page. Previously, the feature only allowed publishing onto a Facebook account's Wall. Pages are where organizations are supposed to communicate with a large number of interested parties.
WordPress.com's Scott Berkun said that this was one of the features most requested by users. The new feature is fast and easy - but is it something that publishers ought to use? Experience and study of the results of this kind of automation don't always make it look so good.
James Gross and Noah Brier have talked to a lot of people at a lot of different companies around the world and they say the number one most-asked question by corporate execs about to jump into social media is almost always "but what should I Tweet about?"
The blank white box, as Gross and Brier refer to the interface presented by almost all other social media publishing tools, is a path to writer's block or ineffective self-promotion for most corporate participants in online social media. These two experienced practitioners from the advertising and marketing world have now launched a much-anticipated new service called Percolate that aims to give people something to talk about. They've quickly built up a small customer base, have bootstrapped a team of 7 employees and this week they are opening the service to the world. The first 300 ReadWriteWeb readers to visit the site through this link can access Percolate right away.
Thirteen years ago this spring, Dave Winer's UserLand Software launched a technical protocol that made it easy to publish content from one Web page onto another. (Winer was the inspiration for ReadWriteWeb and countless other blogs.) A similar protocol was employed by another blogging tool that would launch one year later, Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan's Blogger - which will reportedly now be renamed Google Blogs in the great Google Plus Rebranding of 2011. The creation of easy, democratic publishing of content from one Web interface, out onto another, was an event of epic and irreversible historic proportions. Hundreds of millions of people have now had their lives changed by being able to publish freely and easily online and the media landscape has exploded.
Things are different these days, though. The rise of Facebook and Twitter has stolen the thunder of Do It Yourself and Own It Yourself Publishing. Those little blips and quips of insight and boredom are more fleeting than blogging ever was. But out of that shallow and fast-flowing river of self-publishing has come curation. And today social media curation crosses another key threshold: market leading curation and publishing tool Storify now supports Dave Winer's original protocol for publishing content to blogs. Storify will now use XML-RPC to push permanent, search engine-friendly HTML along with dynamic Javascript to blogs built on WordPress.com, WordPress.org, Tumblr, Posterous and Drupal. Social media curation has grown up and is becoming a first class citizen of the open Web, just like blogging.
For those of you that are men (or women) of a certain age (as close to the age of the characters of the wonderfully named TV show), it will come as no surprise that the focus of our communications tools these days is social networks. But how our communications have evolved from synchronous to asynchronous is less well thought out.
Back when I was growing up in corporate America, we were coming off the mainframe era where most of the communications were encapsulated inside manila inter-office memos. That was mostly asynch - you received the memo and acted accordingly. Then came DISSOS and PROFS and the ability to email someone, and we quickly made the transition to more synchronous times. No more waiting, or so it seemed. It took a good ten years or so before email became the lifeblood of corporate communications, and this was before the Internet really took off in the middle 1990s, when dot coms could be purchased by anyone with a credit card.
Today the community behind open source blogging platform, WordPress, released its latest version: 3.2. It features a design refresh and speed improvements. That's all par for the course for a software update these days. What actually caught my attention was a slightly gimmicky thing called Distraction Free Writing (or DFW). As the name suggests, what this does is remove all distractions from your computer screen... so all you see is the words that you are typing. The WordPress community has nicknamed this a "zen mode."
Over the past week, we at ReadWriteWeb have been obsessed with a new social networking toy called Google Plus. Some of our team think it may even be better than Twitter and Facebook. Personally, I haven't caught the Plus bug yet, and in many ways I'm resisting precisely because I want less social media distractions, not more. Indeed, I think we need more zen on the Web and less plus!
Visitors to WordPress.com blogs will now be able to sign in with their Facebook or Twitter accounts in order to leave comments. This is in addition, of course, to being able to comment anonymously (as a "Guest") or as a WordPress user.
The new feature is intended to give users the flexibility to decide which identity they want to utilize for comments, even if they're logged in to WordPress via multiple accounts. You can, for example, be logged in via Facebook or WordPress but decide to leave your comments under your Twitter profile.
Google announced today that it has begun indexing attribution of content to particular authors, not just to the websites they appear on. Links associated with the author of a page can now have the code rel="author" added to them and Google will understand that to mean that the linked name is the linking page's author. That's a potentially significant change to the balance of power between sites and the individuals that create for them.
For example, if you're on ReadWriteWeb right now you can see my name (Marshall Kirkpatrick) linked-to with rel="author" in the HTML. This will enable Google to show an author's own content independently in search results and the company says it is working to determine what all this means for page authority in search results. Google worked with a handful of big publishers to institute this admittedly small technical change and the markup is now automatically included in all content published on Blogger and Youtube.
Men outnumber women in the tech industry. This isn't particularly newsworthy, although it continues to be quite disheartening.
Figures released today from web monitoring company Royal Pingdom highlight another repercussion of the skewed gender representation in tech - namely, the overwhelming predominance of male visitors to technology blogs.
Royal Pingdom looked a number of popular tech blogs, including ReadWriteWeb, and examined the ratio of male to female site visitors by using demographics data from Google's DoubleClick Ad Planner.
Popular mobile app Instapaper isn't just a great way to catch up on reading when you're spending time offline. It's also a little bit of magic that blends the quiet of time disconnected with the buzz of the social web. It looks like that may become all the more true with the addition of a blogging tool to the Instapaper app, if a public conversation about the matter can be taken literally.
Instapaper stores stripped-down copies of articles you select from the web, but offline on your device so you can read without connectivity. With the latest version of the app launched a few months ago, you can designate an article for sharing out on Twitter or Facebook once you get back online later. Today WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg asked Instapaper founder Marco Arment to enable posting to a WordPress blog from inside Instapaper. "I'll make it happen," was Arment's response. Cool!
