Posts tagged ‘WordPress.com’

Jan 2

2010 in review

Automattic’s amazing Data team launched a new stats project over the weekend. It’s an “Annual Report” that was emailed out to WordPress.com bloggers and contained the stats you see below, along with a helpful link to publish them out to your blog. I especially love that Martin, Joen, and Andy took the time to humanize the bigger numbers, so they become more comprehensible. Great start to 2011 for WordPress.com.

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 10,000 times in 2010. That’s about 24 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 69 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 204 posts. There were 87 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 21mb. That’s about 2 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was January 5th with 276 views. The most popular post that day was Happy New Year.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were automattic.com, Google Reader, ma.tt, twitter.com, and people.mozilla.org.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for google, pkb, paul kim, using bugzilla, and baron davis dunk.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Happy New Year December 2009
16 comments

Firefox Start Page Update November 2007
10 comments

A Good Day April 2006
15 comments

a non-developer’s guide to using bugzilla March 2007
8 comments

Bio February 2006

Some of your most popular posts were written before 2010. Your writing has staying power! Consider writing about those topics again.

Dec 30

Take the WordPress.com Daily Post challenge

If you’re a blogger and you’re looking for something difficult but rewarding to take on in 2011, check out Scott Berkun’s Daily Post challenge over at WordPress.com.

The Post Every Day challenge

Daily habits are the best way to make change happen. If you can remember to do something every day, by the end of the year, you’ll have done that thing over 300 times! Simple and amazing.

As part of the DailyPost, we’re launching two campaigns:

* Post a Day 2011: Post something to your blog every single day through 2011
* Post a Week 2011: Post to your blog at least once a week through 2011

If you’re thinking big, sign up for PostADay. If you’re haven’t posted in ages, or have never posted at all, PostAWeek might be your speed. Still noble and bold, but perhaps more your style.

And of course, feel free to set your own goal – sign up as if you were doing PostAWeek, just so we can keep tabs on what you’re up to.

Dec 29

Essay Velocity

Much longer than usual quote from the source, but this is dynamic reporting by Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic on the velocity of one essay and the people who accelerated it forward, c. 2010.

Bady’s kept the Zunguzungu blog since March of 2007 when he traveled to Tanzania. He’s averaged 15 or 20 posts a month since, mostly just links and blockquoted excerpts. In May of 2010, he had a big day when he posted about “The Soul of Mark Zuckerberg,” deconstructing one Zuckerberg quote with the help of W.E.B. DuBois. That post ended up linked by Jillian York, who works at Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. Bady thinks it’s that post that brought his blog to the attention of several in that sphere, including Cambridge resident and ethnomusicologist Wayne Marshall, who just so happens to be giving a talk at Berkman tomorrow. Marshall, in turn, appears to have been the key link between Bady and the world at large. He retweeted Bady’s announcement of his post on November 29. (UPDATE, 8:04 pm: Marshall pointed out to me on Twitter he’s known about Bady since December of 2008, and he’s got a blog post to prove it.)

The next day, the Berkman Center’s Ethan Zuckerman tweeted the post, calling it a useful close reading of Assange’s 2006 essay (which it is). Zuckerman is one of the most respected thinkers and writers on the geopolitical implications of technology and his tweet went far. It was retweeted by 30 people — and more importantly brought the post to the attention of BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin, which sent traffic pouring to the post. The same day, WikiLeaks Twitter feed also linked to the post, saying “Good essay on one of the key ideas behind WikiLeaks.” 90 more people retweeted the post. According to BackType, almost 2,500 people have tweeted the story.

By 12:45 p.m. on the 30th, the post had made Nieman Journalism Lab’s Popular on Twitter list for the day. By 6:39 p.m., the New York Times’ Lede breaking-news blog had linked to Bady’s post. According to traffic logs Bady shared with me, almost 50,000 people visited the post that day, including — no doubt — many of the most influential journalists and opinion leaders. Tens of thousands have visited in the days since. Bady regularly engages in Twitter conversations now with the academics and journalists covering the story. Volunteers translated his story into Spanish, Dutch, and German.

- Alexis Madrigal, “The Unknown Blogger Who Changed WikiLeaks Coverage”

Dec 18

Fall and Winter 2010 Automattic Talks

Belatedly, two talks about Automattic, WordPress.com, and the road ahead for us delivered by Toni and Matt at Web 2.0 Summit and Le Web this year.

Sep 27

WordPress.com and Windows Live Partnership

“As we looked at customers’ blogging needs and what different companies were providing, we were particularly interested in what WordPress.com is doing. They have a host of impressive capabilities – from a scalable platform and leading spam protection, to great personalization and customization. WordPress powers over 8.5% of the web, is used on over 26 million sites, and WordPress.com is seen by over 250 million people every month. Not only that, Automattic is a company filled with great people focused on improving blogging experiences. So rather than having Windows Live invest in a competing blogging service, we decided the best thing we could do for our customers was to give them a great blogging solution through WordPress.com.”
– Dharmesh Mehta, Microsoft, on today’s partnership announcement with us at Automattic. Our post is here.

Jun 16

The Son of Gutenberg: How WordPress changed the way we publish

“Technology and social media are redrawing the roadmap to authorial success. And for every Justin Halpern, there are 10,000 professional writers wondering how to turn blogs, microblogs, and Twitterfeeds into media empires, especially now that their magazines, newspapers, and media organizations are contracting at an alarming rate. Blogs, of course, are the first refuge for professional writers fleeing the withering establishment media, and for hordes of would-be scribes finding their own voice. For these multitudes, WordPress.com has become the 21st-century equivalent of Gutenberg’s printing press.”

– Marion Maneker profiles Automattic for The Big Money in “The Son of Gutenberg: How WordPress changed the way we publish”

Jan 31

BBC Click Essential Guide to Blogging

Good overview of the basics of blogging by the BBC’s Click program, using WordPress.com for the demo. Hat tip: Mark R.

Nov 2

6 Comments

Go Mobile with WordPress 2 for iPhone

Last week we released WordPress 2 for the iPhone. You can read the announcement by Matt Thomas here.

I’m excited about this release because I’ve become a fan of the iPhone after some initial skepticism, centered around the physical interface (I do still miss the keyboard of my Blackberry 8703e). Over time I’ve come to appreciate the iPhone’s integration, polish and utility. Maybe too much, if you ask my wife.

With WordPress 2, the development team has created a high quality blogging app, one that I think many iPhone users will enjoy putting through its paces.