I’ll be at the WordPress meetup at Latinoware tomorrow (Saturday) at 17:00. I’m speaking earlier in the day at 11:00. Been around the conference today and been really impressed with the breadth of subjects covered and the number of attendees. Confused about the logo though. (Is South America tucked into Africa?) Se você fala Português passar esta sobre a sua audiência. ¶

October 31st, 2008

Around the Latinoware conference in Brazil at Itaipu Binacional, and dinner at a churrascaria afterward.

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Eric Martin carved a WordPress pumpkin. Happy Halloween everybody. ¶

One of my sister’s photos was on Digg, randomly. ¶

I’ll be in Honolulu this Saturday for PodCamp / WordCamp Hawaii 2008. ¶

Gravatars: Why Both Commenters and Publishers Should Use It. ¶

David Bell writes in that Stephen Fry’s new website is on WordPress, and looks quite dandy too. ¶

In Alabama? WP designer MT will be at the upcoming Mobile WordPress Meetup. ¶

People who know me know I’m a fan of LOLcats, well now they have a new book! (What a website, as they say in the South.) I got a review copy and it’s delightful, sure to bring a smile to anybody’s day. ¶

Two cakes to share today: the first is a shared birthday cake we had at our Automattic offsite in Breckenridge and the second was put together by David Link just for the joy of WP (and cake). Yum! ¶

Microsoft’s new Web Application Installer will install WordPress for you. Who woulda thunk it? You can read more on their Channel 8 blog. ¶

Oct
15

Filed under: Automattic | October 15th, 2008

PollDaddy Goes Automattic

It’s another exciting day here at Automattic. Today we finally get to announce that we’ve acquired the market-leading poll and survey service PollDaddy.

For a year or two now, I’ve been minorly obsessed with polls and surveys as a method of lightweight interaction that engages casual users of your website and also can get you some really fun data to play with. I’ve also mentioned at a few WordCamps that a polling plugin is one of the top 10 WordPress plugins in the world. Polls are really popular with WordPress users.

As we started to look at building out our own service for this, it became more obvious that, while on the surface it’s a very simple problem, there’s a lot of hidden complexity and opportunities for some really powerful features under the hood. There are probably a dozen companies addressing this space right now, but as we started to survey the space I was struck by how often I’d see this “PollDaddy” thing pop up.

Two guys in Ireland with a quirky company name were cleaning up with some of the largest and most respected websites using their service on a daily basis. They weren’t the biggest, but they had the high end of the market. It seemed to be the WordPress of the polling space.

I took a secret trip to Sligo and put back a few pints with the team and we decided to make things work. They went to bed every night and woke up every morning thinking about polls and surveys, and were iterating at a great pace. By plugging into Automattic’s experience at creating internet-scale services and the distribution of WordPress.com, I knew we could take Polldaddy to an entirely new level in a relatively short amount of time.

Today we just enabled PollDaddy integration with 4.4 million blogs on WordPress.com and have released the first version of their .org plugin.

You can read more about the acquisition on the PollDaddy blog, Toni’s blog, and the WP.com blog. I’m super excited to have Lenny and Eoin as part of the Automattic family, and I’m looking forward to seeing the service flourish with its newfound resources.

Tyler Durden’s 8 Rules of Innovation and the word of the day on Podictionary is “slide.” ¶

Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago has two blogs on WordPress.com: O Caderno de Saramago and El Cuaderno de Saramago. Saramago, 85, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. One of his novels, Blindness was turned into a movie of the same name, released this month. (Hat tip: Antonio Dias) ¶

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! ¶

October 10th, 2008

Final day in Berlin.

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October 9th, 2008

Friedrichshain and Berlin Web 2.0 / WordPress meetup.

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October 8th, 2008

Exploring Alexanderplatz area and dinner party.

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Oct
6

Filed under: Events | Tags: berlin, web 2.0 expo (3) | October 6th, 2008

Berlin WordPress / Web 2.0 Expo Drinkup

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.

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. ¶

Matt Mullenweg is one of PC World’s Top 50 People on the Web, Inc.com’s 30 under 30, and Business Week’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web. More »

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