Matt mullenweg and crew just wrapped up Wordcamp 2008, the annual user and developer conference which also has several dozen community driven sister events around the world.
This is one of my favorite events as it is a great opportunity for an investor/board member type like me to get a good sense of the community around our company’s product — while Matt and Toni give us updates on the community (which they consider a critical consituency and source of strategic value), that just is not the same as meeting community members themselves and hearing what is on their mind.
Regrettably I had to miss Wordcamp this year as I was on a vaca with my family on a remote lake in Maine. However, last night we rolled into Hanover, NH, to drop our daughter off at soccer camp, and as I am reconnecting via my iPhone (after a week blissfully unplugged), I am happy to see that there is lots of good coverage of the event which from a distance seems to have been a success.
From a TechCruncc post, I picked up some stats Matt shard to illustrate the fantastic growth WordPress has seen: monthly pageviews up from just over a billion to 6.5 billion, 32million new blog posts, and an audience that, according to Comscore figures for unique monthly visitors, is now 6 times that of nearest competitor Typepad.
It certainly has been a good year for WordPress, and while the challenges are tougher than ever, the opportunities are also greater than ever, and we are banking on the next year being even stronger.
Getting ready for what I hope will be a vacation-packed and restful August (I need it!), I spent the month of July in California, bouncing between SF and SoCal (where my family was staying at the in-laws).
Meanwhile, the good folks at WordPress were busy too. Rather than summarizing, I have copied below Matt’s “July Wrap Up” post:
I have been convinced for some time that we are in the midst of an important chapter of the web — the emergence of the social web.
This all started, of course, with the runaway success of a few large social networks like MySpace and Facebook, etc., which was followed by the legions of “social network for ___” plays. Soon, it became pretty clear that what was likely to happen was, rather than social networks replacing websites, what we would see was the larger sites embracing social features.
I still expect this is what will happen. But more and more what seems to be happening is the dominant social networks and social services offering their data — social data — to be incorporated into third party websites and web services. Of course, this data will be used to enable third parties to offer social features, but I am becoming convinced that the data piece, and not the functionality piece, will be the key.
My conversation today with the founder of Gnip, former MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier, has me all the more convinced.
I was meeting with an entrepreneur today, who said to me that the way to build a web 2.0 company is first to build a feature, then figure out how to turn it into a product, then to try to build that into a company.
Not sure I fully agree, but if nothing else an interesting way of thinking about it.
My kids are still recovering from the Manny trade to the Dodgers. Since we are all out here in Los Angeles, what better to do than head to Dodger Stadium to watch Manny in Dodger Blue. And, sure enough, he didn’t fail us, delivering a single, double and Homer.
We’ll miss having Manny around to marvel and chuckle at, but I also don’t envy Joe Torre having to manage him.
“The idea is instead of doing a lot of work researching/googling, you just ping/spam your social net with a question and get them to do the work for you.”
Last night I had a conversation with the last few stragglers at FaceCamp on exactly the same topic. And last week I had two such conversations.
I think this is one area where the social web is going to make a real contribution. Somebody should be investing here…
