With May drawing to a close, we’re several weeks out from seeing many of you at VIP Workshop, and WordCamp Europe is just days away. See below for the past month’s highlights from across the enterprise WordPress ecosystem and the media and marketing landscape.
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News and releases
Updates from around VIP, our clients, and our agency and technical partners.
- The WordPress.com for Google Docs Add-on has had a few updates since its launch in March, including support for categories and tags, and post types. If your team uses Google Docs as part of your editorial workflow, this Chrome extension could save some time. (changelog)
- Emily Schechter, Product Manager for Chrome Security at Google, gave a talk about the importance of HTTPS at Google I/O, featuring the story of our own extensive rollout.
- WordPress.com VIP is now Privacy Shield certified under the EU-US and Swiss-US Privacy Shield Frameworks.
- Human Made shared their company handbook with the world and also released Cavalcade, a “a horizontally-scalable WordPress jobs processing solution.”
- Inpsyde published a detailed and visually rich look at their company retreat.
- Alley Interactive updated the Publish to Apple News plugin to version 1.2.7, with minor bug fixes.
- Recent reader-facing feature updates to VIP clients FiveThirtyEight and The Undefeated include allowing visitors to embed the site’s podcasts via iframe code snippet, and implementation of the Apple metatags for smart podcast promotion.
- Technology partner Parse.ly analyzed more than 10 million articles published last year to find out which platforms drove site traffic, broken down by topics.
- WordPress 4.7.5 security and maintenance release and Jetpack 4.9 launched. The latter included new widgets and bug fixes.
- WordPress 4.8 is expected around June 8-9. VIP customers, check the VIP Lobby for more info related to the release.
- A hackathon for small businesses in Detroit staffed by volunteer WordPress developers turned in to WordPress.com’s first ever TV ads.
Media and Marketing Notes
Research and perspectives on the business of media and the practice of marketing.
“Mobile Ad-Blocking Skyrockets: In developing markets where data costs can be high, users are increasingly blocking ads whenever they can. Nearly 400 million people around the world block mobile ads.”
-TechCrunch coverage of Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends presentation. (slides, video via Recode)
“Google Attribution works by integrating with AdWords, Google Analytics and DoubleClick Search to bring together ad data from across Google to give a more complete view of performance. It is based on tech Google acquired when it bought attribution company Adometry three years ago. The machine learning works by determining how much credit to assign each step in the consumer journey – whether a first search or a final click before purchase. It analyses each account’s unique conversion patterns to compare the paths of those who convert with those that don’t, meaning personalised results.”
-Sarah Visard covers the May 23 launch of Google Attribution and related tools at Marketing Week.
“Now, when you click on a Trending topic, you’ll see a carousel with stories from other publications about a given topic that you can swipe through. By making it easier to see what other news outlets are saying about each topic, we hope that people will feel more informed about the news in their region.”
-Ali Amahdi and John Angelo at Facebook, on their redesigned Trending results page, which aims to distribute attention on timely topics to a broader set of publishers and views.
“Our interviews with more than 70 social media managers and strategists for the Tow Center for Digital Journalism’s “The Platform Press: How Silicon Valley Reengineered Journalism” found that expensive news distribution strategies aren’t yet yielding enough consistent revenue for publishers to justify the costs or to know whether their strategies are working.”
-Nushin Rashidian at CJR, on the challenges of publishers caught in the crossfire between social media platforms, and the complexity of trying to optimize assets like video to multiple competing specifications.
Featured May Launch: Spotify Jobs
We’re proud to highlight Spotifyjobs.com which launched on VIP in early May. The site integrates several API’s and features vibrant, emotive moving image backgrounds that use focus pulls as a design element.
Awards and Recognition
Congratulations to Big Bite Creative for winning a European Digital Media Award for Best Lifestyle, Sports, and Entertainment app, for their React native/WordPress powered football news app 11versus11.
Upcoming Events: WordCamp Europe
The big event in June – in fact, the biggest event in WordPress history is this year’s WordCamp Europe, with well over 2,000 people expected in Paris. The event opens with Contributor Day on Thursday June 15 where VIP’s Tom Nowell will be helping first-timers take their first steps in core contribution. Then on Friday and Saturday it’s the usual packed schedule of talks and demos, with VIP’s Simon Dickson returning to the stage as an MC. Look out for VIP wranglers Andrea, David (A), Scott, Shannon and Stefan among the army of volunteers.
Speakers at the event will include Rian Rietveld, John Blackbourn, Jenny Wong and Petya Raykovska from Human Made; Adam Silverstein from 10up; and Rahul Bansal from rtCamp. Matt Mullenweg will do his now traditional Q&A on the Saturday afternoon, in the company of Om Malik. And watch out for Automattic’s John Maeda, a big hit at our Napa workshop last month, on why design is often an afterthought – and why designers are to blame.
If you can’t join us in Paris, watch for announcement about the conference livestream in the coming few days; or catch up afterwards at WordPress.tv.
Other Events
- Technology partner Skyword is hosting brand storytelling conference Forward 2017, June 15, in Boston.
- Getty Images will be hosting the panel discussion Seeing is Believing: The Power of Re-picturing Stereotypes at this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on June 22 at 4pm.
- Speaker submissions are now wrapped up for the first WordCamp for Publishers, which will be August 17-19 in Denver.
- The WordCamp US call for speakers will be open until June 23 at 11:59 EST. The event itself will take place December 1-3 in Nashville, TN.
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