The Challenge

WordCamp Buenos Aires part 1

Published by Esteban Glas on November 8th, 2008 | This post lacks all category except for: Blogs

Alejandro Piscitelli

Alejandro Piscitelli opens the day.
Participation Culture. Blogging comes to age, Internet is the 21st century printing press. Before Gutenberg only 1000 books were created per year in Europe.

Web 2.0 is participation architecture. Alejandro is sharing Technorati’s “state of the bloggosphere”. Blogs have a short lifespan.

Personal blogging came first. Only then did Corporations grasp it.

Alejandro is sharing hhis blogs / sites: InterLink Headline News, Filosofitis, and some internal education blogs he uses to give class.

He shares the October number of Esquire.

Crowdsourcing as a knowledge strategy, MATLAB, Innocentive and the power of difference. Jeff Howe wrote most of the starting knowledge on crowdsourcing.

Detractors of crowdsourcing: Nicholas Karr, Mark Bauerline, state that we are dumber due to computers and the internet.

Generation differences between Baby Boomers, Generation X and “Generation Einstein“, (those under 20).

Cultural convergence. Henry Jenkins focuses on Fans and participation clutlure. Barriers have fallen for creativity and civic commitment.

Kids today have to learn “Digital Competencies”. Thys turns them into natural multi-taskers. They can switch focus rapidly.

The internet created a Virtual Crowd (Jeff Howe).

Innocentive is a site were people can “sell” problems, so the community can solve it.

Ned Gulley: Addictive Collaboration. On MatLab they find code solutions 1000 times faster than on any company.

Matt Mullenweg

Matt has already learnt to say “Buenos Dias”. Last year’s wordcamp was the first international one, now they are all over the world. His favourite WordCamp was in Philippines. There was a pool between the stage and the public, bats flew all the place, the Mic was a Karaoke machine.

Don’t believe what wired says, blogging is not dead.

History of Wordpress.

He started on movable type and then moved to b2. It was all great untill the main coder disappeared. His first opensource contribution was made for b2.

After Matt wished that there was a better blogging / publishing platform, a comment by “Mike” invited him to do a fork of b2. That is how wordpress was born.

He then was offered a job at cNet, staying there for about a year. He learnt he was a bad employee. Automattic’s first project was Akismet. He created it because his mom wanted a blog, and “spam was not appropiate for a Texas Catholic Woman”.

Wordpress.com gets 2 terabytes of uploadsper month, 1 billion dynamic pages. 14.2 billion requests (7,300 per second). 7.1 million wordpress.org blogs.

WordPress 2.7. Live Demo!

They used laser eye tracking to test the new dashboard for 2.7 The dashboard is completely customizable. As a matter of fact everything is highly customizable (for example comment views).

Threaded comments and comment pagination are other innovations in 2.7.

Future.

WordPress is going to go mobile. iPhone WordPress app is massive in the US. You should be able to check your stats on your mobile.

There is a long tail of plugins. Popular plugins: Akismet, SEO stuff. Average WP blog has 4.9 plugins. This makes every WordPress different. “WordPress by itself is pretty boring”.

They Created a directory because some people were taking advantage of the users, embedding virus in themes.

They created an internal Twitter called Prologue.

WordPress showcase: they feature the best wordpress instances

buddypress: they want to make it easy to create social networks.

Q&A.

BBPress: they don’t promote it because they don’t want to break backwords compatibility. Once 1.0 is out they’ll also work in integrating it to WordPress.

Wordpress MU: it trails Main Wordpress by 2 to 3 weeks. They are also redesigning WordPress MU backend.

Plugins: they are working on algorithms to predict what plugins will become popular. Not every plugin will make its way into the WordPress Code. It would make the system slower, and it is not convenient.

Prospected Social Network system: WordPressers should come together and connect. No hosted Buddy Press in the foreseable future. “Facebook does an amazing job at what they do”. “For the 95% of what we do we have no idea how or if we will make money out of it, we’re a bit like google in that, and we’re just lucky that that 5% pays for everything else.”

DiSo (Distributed social networks) is the “glue” for social networks.

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