Matt Mullenweg

Gravatar Anniversary.

Matt — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 03:03:37 +0000

It’s now been one year since Automattic acquired Gravatar. “Gravatar now lives on about 20 servers. 2 Database servers, 1 File server, 2 Load balancers, 5 Caching servers, 9 Web servers, and 1 Development server. That combination of servers is handling an average of 7,214 of your requests every second of every day. That’s a whopping 623,293,056 requests daily!” Wowza!

Berlin WordPress / Web 2.0 Expo Drinkup

Matt — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 04:09:50 +0000

I’m in Germany for the first time and I’d love to meet some of the WordPress community here. With the help of Yamile Yemoonyah we have a venue and such for a get-together this Thursday. Since there’s an upcoming Web 2.0 Expo right here in Berlin we’re co-hosting with those folks to make the event extra-fun. Here are the deets:

Thursday, Oct 9th at 7 p.m.
“Dachkammer”
Simon-Dach-Str. 39
10245 Berlin
030 2961673

If you have a German blog or Twitter please help spread the word! Hope to see you there.

Update: Got a discount code from the conference, if you register here and enter the code webeu08gr99 you’ll get a 35% discount.

Absentee Ballot Voting

Matt — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:00:52 +0000

Because of travel and uncertainty with my schedule I’m going to vote absentee in this election. There seem to be two good sites with wizards that walk you through everything: Go Vote Absentee and Long Distance Voter. Going into polls and waiting in lines seems like an anachronism. Someday I hope I can vote online.

Broken Kindle

Matt — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:36:24 +0000

My Kindle is quite broken, not sure how it happened, probably it got pressure in my bag or something? Since I’ve been professing my love of the Kindle to anyone who will listen maybe Amazon will send a replacement, if not I’ll try to go through support when I get back to the states. In the meantime, back to reading dead trees (or more likely not much at all).

In Berlin

Matt — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:04:14 +0000

If there are any WordPress users that will be in Berlin next week drop me an email - matt at my last name dot com.

Theme Revolution

Matt — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:01:59 +0000

Brian Gardner’s Revolution theme, widely regarded as the most successful in the “premium” theme space, has seen the light and is going 100% Open Source under the GPL. Definitely a forward-thinking and strategic move. I think this may shake up the premium theme space.

Bandwidth Caps

Matt — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:13:39 +0000

GigaOM White Paper: The Facts & Fiction of Bandwidth Caps

The Publisher

Matt — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 22:54:04 +0000

I’ve been dubbed The Publisher by BusinessWeek as one of their “25 Most Influential People on the Web.” Before anyone else writes in that I beat Rupert Murdoch, I think the slideshow is in alphabetical order.

Startonomics This Thursday

Matt — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:41:42 +0000

The Startonomics conference is happening this Thursday in San Francisco and looks pretty interesting, I’m going to try to go by.

Video - How WordPress Has Changed My Life

Matt — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 06:36:21 +0000

Hat tip: Nancy Zimmerman.

Carrington

Matt — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 23:25:25 +0000

Alex King is on stage at WordCamp Utah and just announced and launched the Carrington theme. It allows really advanced conditional template displays based on any number of variables and executed by naming conventions and its structure. I think this could be the base for a whole new generation of themes and development.

Mark Cuban, Jason Calacanis, Hackaday, and Royal Navy

Matt — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 22:20:38 +0000

Mark Cuban, Jason Calacanis, Hackaday, and the Royal Navy all now have WordPress-powered blogs. The first three switched from Blogsmith. Hat tip: Automattic Publisher Blog.

Revisiting Moral Hazard

Matt — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 07:16:00 +0000

Revisiting Moral Hazard, by Bob McTeer. (Whom I’ve met.)

WordCamp Weekend

Matt — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 06:05:00 +0000

There’s not one but ~~three~~ four WordCamps this weekend. I just got back from China, where both the Beijing and Shanghai events were great. (More pictures coming soon.) This Saturday you can check out WordPress events in Portland, Salt Lake City (I’ll be attending this one, they asked me first), Vancouver, and Birmingham.

Intense Debate Goes Automattic

Matt — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:24:00 +0000

Some cool news today — Automattic is acquiring Intense Debate. You can read more on Jon’s blog on Intense Debate, or on Toni’s blog, or on VC Mike’s blog.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the product, Intense Debate supercharges the comment section of WordPress blogs and other sites with cool features like threading, reply by email, voting, reputation, and global profiles. There are a few companies tackling this space right now, but I was impressed with how much ID (Intense Debate) has been able to do with a small team, and happy to find that their common platform (PHP and MySQL) would make integration a lot easier.

Going forward, the plan is to keep Intense Debate available as a platform-agnostic independent service, much like Akismet. We’ll start to integrate its features into WordPress core, WordPress.com, and Gravatar as appropriate. For example, comment threading is going to be in WordPress 2.7, but reply by email is a lot easier to implement on a hosted service like WordPress.com. We’re also going to be able to lend our expertise in scaling to the ID team to make sure their users enjoy the same hassle-free speed and bulletproof availability as users of other Automattic services.

Long-term, I think that comments are the most crucial interaction point for blogs, and an area that deserves a lot of investment and innovation. Comments really haven’t changed in a decade, and it’s time to spice things up a little.

We were early in the space with investing in Akismet to solve the spam problem, but now I think the real growth opportunities are in the user interaction and social features across comments. There is a huge opportunity to increase the traffic and engagement of blogs significantly. WordPress.com alone already gets about three legitimate comments every second — more than a quarter of a million every day. I’m excited to see what the Intense Debate team can do to make things more interesting.

18 on 30 Under 30

Matt — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 22:43:00 +0000

Inc. just announced their Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30 and I came in at #18. Cool! Some really young ones on the list though — I’m getting old.

First day in Beijing

Matt — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 08:00:00 +0000

Flying to Beijing, dinner, walking around Tienanmen Square.

Going to China

Matt — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 21:42:00 +0000

I’m going to be in China later this week for WordCamp Shanghai and Beijing. Really looking forward to meeting all the WordPress users there.

Dropbox

Matt — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 04:44:00 +0000

Dropbox is open to the public now. I’d love something like this I could use with my own Subversion server.

CMS Critic Interview

Matt — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:51:00 +0000

There’s a new interview up at CMS Critic.