ReadWriteWeb

Over the last year, blogging platform WordPress has nearly doubled in size growing from 10.5 million blogs last March to 18 million today. With more than 10% of the Web powered by Wordpress - according to founding developer Matt Mullenweg - it has become increasingly important for the company to support more interfaces and today it has done just that with iPad-optimized themes.

The company announced today that an iPad-optimized view would be immediately available, bringing "swiping, rotation, and many other features of the iPad" to all 18 million blogs on WordPress.com.

The web conference circuit is increasingly crowded and covers a wide range of topics. Unless you're Robert Scoble, you probably don't get to attend all of the events that you'd like. Even with the events you do attend, you likely won't see all of the sessions you'd planned to (cough, SXSW!). Fortunately, there are a number of web services and sites which give you access to much of the content of a conference, whether you attend or not.

I went to SXSW in Austin this month, but once again I struggled to attend as many panels and sessions as I'd wanted to. So I decided to use the Web to find out what I missed, content wise, at SXSW. Here's what I found.

At the end of SXSW Interactive, I was interviewed by WebBeat.TV's Pelpina Trip. We discussed what was, in my view, the main trend of the event: group messaging. The ReadWriteWeb team tested a couple of these products, Beluga and GroupMe. We ended up using Beluga for the duration of SXSW, to keep in touch with team members in real time (see also Mike Melanson's analysis of these apps). I also discussed with Pelpina the story that ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick broke at SXSW about a new social networking product from Google. It was arguably the biggest tech story published during the event and continues to generate discussion to this day. Full video below!

I spent much of my fourth consecutive year at the South by Southwest Interactive festival capturing tweets, photos and other moments from the thousands of people in attendance. To accomplish this, I used curation platform Storify, which incidentally won this year's SXSWi Startup Accelerator competition for news technologies. Although still in private beta, Storify is getting a lot of well-deserved notice.

If 2010 was the year of location-based services, then 2011 is certainly the year of group messaging. With a slew of new group messaging apps dominating this year's SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, the big questions have been why now and why not Facebook or Twitter?

The answer, it seems, could be very simple. Group messaging apps do something that sites like Facebook and Twitter don't - they take away the magic and the guesswork and provide a blunt instrument for communicating with small groups of people using both data and text messaging.

As the creator of one of the Internet's most base, vile and creative websites, 4chan founder Chris Poole knows a little bit about the effects of user identity on user behavior. 4chan, a completely anonymous, real-time message forum, is the birthplace of many an Internet meme and user identity, or the lack thereof, can play a big part in this.

Poole spoke about the collaborative, creative process today in his keynote address at SXSW in Austin, Texas, spending some time on the topic of identity and authenticity. In this horserace, Poole unsurprisingly comes out on the side of anonymity.

With SXSW well under way in Austin, Texas, the servers behind apps like Beluga, GroupMe, Kik and FastSociety must be working overtime. After all, people like talking to their friends, right?

In this same batch of apps, we've seen another phenomenon, though - apps that make it quicker an easier to talk to people you don't know - and we have one big question: Do people really want to talk to strangers?

The last 10 years have been called the era of Web 2.0, a term used to describe a new type of online experience, wherein a user could be both author and audience. That decade, said SCVNGR CEO Seth Priebatsch today in his opening keynote at the SXSW conference, was the decade of social. 

That decade, however, has been won, said Priebatsch. Facebook has come away as the clear leader and now, a new decade is upon us - the decade of games. These are not children's games, however. These are games that could change the world.

Whether you're looking for a red-hot party in Austin tonight or for a quiet place with a smaller crowd, navigation's made easier by the way people declare their locations online. PR firm Waggener Edstrom Worldwide today launched a handy little app for iOS or Windows 7 called WeDig.It, which queries the Foursquare API to show you a map of places around Austin that have a lot, or a few, people checked in.

Last night I happened upon the back patio of my favorite place in town and was overjoyed to find that almost no one else was there. It was a great place for conversation. Maybe tonight I'll be looking for just the opposite.

For those of you lucky enough to be attending SXSW in Austin, Texas this week, we'd like to know which panels you regard as Must-See. The panel list for this event is overwhelming, even with the help of scheduling services like Sched.org. This is my second SXSW. Last year, my (belated) debut, I got a bit overwhelmed with business meetings and I didn't attend many of the panels. This year I'll again be focusing mostly on meetings and networking, but I've resolved to squeeze in at least 5 panels. I hope I get to more than that! These are personal choices and most likely won't match yours. So let me know in the comments which panels YOU regard as Must-See at this year's SXSW.