Tag Archives: Blogging

We Raised $29.5 Million!

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Matt, now Ma.tt, and Toni have respectively written “Act Two” and “Automattic fundraising” about us, Automattic, raising a $29.5 million USD round of financing today. Our friend Om has a head start on journalistic coverage with “WordPress.com Creator Raises $29.5M“.

By “we” in the title, I mean I have absolutely nothing to do with the financial matters, so don’t ask.

This development is, of course, a little distracting at the moment, but that will quickly fade.

The fundamentals haven’t changed. We have good, popularly, highly regarded solutions to important, interesting problems. There are many challenges we want to continue to refine our solutions to and many areas we have just started to explore — so many things are too hard, and we know we can help. Most importantly we will stay focused on relationships between real people and being dynamic to your needs — which is really what the web and particularly blogging are all about.

I’m as excited to working for Automattic today as the day I started. Has it really only been just over a year? My job description, like all job descriptions, has changed a lot in this short, and I’m sure it will continue to evolve.

I now spend about half my time working with Raanan, Barry, and Michael and the “major media organization, from the NY Times, WSJ, CNN, Fox, Time, People, and more…” the emerging ones like Giga Omni, Gawker Media’s Gizmodo Live, Blog Talk Radio, Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios and I Can Has Cheezburger.

The rest of my time is focused on participating in WordPress.org.

I love the diversity of challenges my roles expose me to. I love that WordPress is a near universal solution for online publishing, empowering the personal publishers and the major media organizations.

But most of all I love the people. Bloggers and open source participants are the among the most wonderful people I have ever met!

But along the way you still have to feel with some stinker technical challenges and personal conflicts, and that is where my favorite Automattic part comes into play. Every member of the Automattic team I learn from every day and every one of them I would love to call friend.

Andy Olmsted’s Final Post

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Andy Olmsted, a US Army Major was killed in Iraq on Jan. 3, 2008. The following day his friend published Final Post written by Andy in case he was killed.

I highly recommend you read it, and the other articles this very thoughtful and articulate person shared on his blog and in other online communities. Here is one of the many passages in Final Post that really moved me:

But for those who knew me and feel this pain, I think it’s a good thing to realize that this pain has been felt by thousands and thousands (probably millions, actually) of other people all over the world. That is part of the cost of war, any war, no matter how justified. If everyone who feels this pain keeps that in mind the next time we have to decide whether or not war is a good idea, perhaps it will help us to make a more informed decision. Because it is pretty clear that the average American would not have supported the Iraq War had they known the costs going in. I am far too cynical to believe that any future debate over war will be any less vitriolic or emotional, but perhaps a few more people will realize just what those costs can be the next time.

“So we asked some bloggers”

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I really enjoyed seeing in 2007 an ever increasing number of people self-identify as bloggers and giving their own meaning to the term. I’m looking forward to even more diverse and expressive uses of blog, blogging, and blogger in 2008.

This is an amazing video put together by rbloggers4peace with bloggers showing their appreciation for Rosie O’ Donnell:

Seen at R BLOG

What does the term blogger mean to you?

WordPress 2.3 Heroes

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September 24, 2007 we released WordPress 2.3, and a little over a month later, this past Friday, we released WordPress 2.3.1.

Yesterday , we, WordPress won Best Open Source Social Networking CMS.

Who are we?

Continue reading →

Todd Cochrane Doesn’t Like MT4′s Podcasting Support, and What That Really Means For WordPress

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Todd Cochrane who wrote the book on podcasting, Podcasting: Do It Yourself Guide, wrote a harsh post about Movable Type 4 not living up to its announced podcasting support claims. The article begins:

From today forward I will no longer recommend Movable Type as a viable new media blogging / podcasting platform. I will recommend WordPress to any and all that ask my advice.

Todd elaborates in the comments on the experience in WordPress that has contributed to his conversion:

Wordpress does have native support when you are publishing a post you will see add media at the bottom of the page.

If you add your media there and hit publish the media will be included as a enclosure in your RSS feed.

While you will not have all the fancy itunes tags you can manually edit your rss template and add that data to be included.

To make it easy the podpress plugin makes it easy for you to add the itunes data to the feed.

Another thing to consider is that at least you can publish a podcast with WordPress today. You cannot say the same with MovableType Version 4 it is simply not possible to publish a podcast with the current version of the blogging software.

Welcome to the team Todd!

Continue reading →

New flockstars!

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Another 1007 Flockstars
October 16th, 2005

At 12:54 AM PST, the first 1007 people from the Flock “announcements” mailing list received an email from Bart Decrem inviting them to join the original Flockstars in trying the The Flock Developer Preview … Preview ;-)

Since the private release (v0.4.6 (0.5pre)) a few days ago to 282 friends of Flock, we have been madly hacked away at the worse bugs. The release (v0.4.7 (0.5pre))

Flockstars

And additional perceptive and detailed feedback is coming in. It is coming in fast enough to really keep me on my toes!

Flockstars have received the Flock Browser!

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Flock.com

Oct 14, 2005 11:29 AM Bart Decrem sent an email to the 282 Flockstars. The first part of the email was:

The Flock Developer Preview … Preview is here
October 14th, 2005

Ni hao, fellow flockstars,Thanks for all the feedback you’ve given us on Flock 0.2. We’re pleased to invite you to try out the latest — and only second ever — private preview of what will very soon become the Flock Developer Preview.

Flockstars

We have not stopped working hard, and all the people that have cheered us on and waited so patiently will have it soon! I look forward to welcoming everyone as Flockstars!