June 13, 2009

WordPress.com is Utter Genius

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I’m a huge fan of WordPress.com. I’m amazed at the platform they’ve created. There are some amazing benefits to using WordPress.com which I’ll save for another post. However, you can be sure that it’s a big part of my marketing strategy. I just wish they’d open it up and allow users to show ads on it already.

What is so amazing about WordPress.com is how they monetize traffic on the site. I’ve been using it for a long time and driven quite a bit of traffic to the site. However, I’d pretty much forgotten that WordPress was putting adds on my blog. At least when they launched, they said it was only a small percentage of the pages on WordPress.com and ads are only shown to people that aren’t logged in to WordPress.com (or was it just users of that blog that weren’t logged in?). Either way, it’s a genius plan.

See, since they don’t show any ads to logged in users (which the owner of the blog is almost always logged in), then owners of the blog forget that the content their creating is being monetized by WordPress.com. How smart is that?

I imagine Matt Mullenweg back there with a little percentage setting that he can change at any time. This week it might be set at 10% of the pages getting ads. Then, next week he decides to double the revenue of WordPress.com and so he changes the setting to 20%. Best part is that users of WordPress.com won’t even notice the difference.

It’s not quite money growing on trees, but pretty close.

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January 10, 2009

Matt Mullenweg Announces WordPress Handbook

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I’m currently sitting in the Las Vegas Wordcamp listening to Matt Mullenweg’s talk on “The State of the Word.” He just announced that WordPress will be launching a WordPress handbook.

The basic concept is that WordPress will be taking a subset of the Codex and some information done from scratch to document the releases of WordPress. This Handbook will be put into subversion and when a new release of WordPress is release, the handbook can be trunked out and be fixed similar to how the code for WordPress is done. Users can submit fixes to the WordPress Handbook and some users will have the ability to commit the changes.

This seems like a really cool idea since it will allow the Handbook to be version specific. It will also make it much easier for the international community to know what to translate (since translating the ever changing Codex is very difficult).

Of course, the first question is how will this work with the Codex. The answer is that the Codex will remain because it has just too much good information. However, Matt said that it’s so new that we’ll have to just see how they work together and which parts will remain in the Codex and which will be moved to the Handbook.

The other important point is that Matt said the document would be saved in a special format (I didn’t catch the exact format) that will allow it to be viewed in multiple formats including: pdf’s, windows help files, etc. Plus, this format allows consultants, plugin creators, etc to be able to integrate their own help files into the main WordPress Handbook. Pretty cool. Sounds like a simple way to create a WordPress for Dummies book.

Matt said that the first version of the WordPress Handbook will be released later this week.

Thanks to Izea for sponsoring my attendance at WordCamp Las Vegas

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January 8, 2009

WordCamp Las Vegas On Saturday

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I must admit that I’m really excited to be able to attend WordCamp Las Vegas this Saturday. I won’t be attending Sunday, because it’s Sunday but I think I’ll get a ton of value out of even just the first day of the conference.

I’ve lived in Las Vegas for almost 4 years now and I’ve never been to Palace Station, so that should be cool to see. The speakers that I’m most excited to see at WordCamp Las Vegas is WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, online whipping boy Jim Kukral and Social Media legend Chris Brogan. A pretty amazing lineup if it was just those 3 speakers.

Even more exciting than the speakers is that it will be fun to meet other people from Las Vegas that use WordPress. I think I only know 2 bloggers from Las Vegas that use WordPress. We’ll see who we meet on Saturday. Should be interesting.

I also must admit that I feel a little embarrassed that this is the blog I listed on the registration page. This is really kind of my play blog. The problem is that I have so many blogs, that I didn’t know which one to choose on the list and just chose this one. It just doesn’t represent my use of WordPress at all. Just take a look at the blogs in my Pure TV blog network to see what I mean:
Something For Nothing – TV and Reality TV Blog
Pure TV Freaks Blog – Blogging TV Freaks
Pure Dancing with the Stars – Blogging Dancing with the Stars on ABC
Pure Amazing Race – Blogging Amazing Race on CBS
Pure So You Think You Can Dance – Blogging So You Think You Can Dance on Fox
Pure Fringe – Blogging Fringe on Fox
Pure America’s Got Talent – Blogging America’s Got Talent
Pure TV Sports – Blogging Sports

Also, I can’t forget to thank my sponsor for WordCamp Las Vegas: Izea. I was the 61st blogger to sign up for Izea (then PayPerPost). The CEO, Ted Murphy, is a freakin rockstar and being a part of the Izea community has been key to many of the things I’ve learned and done with blogging.

I’d love to hear from others going to WordCamp Las Vegas. See you there.

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