First I wanted to thank everyone that came out terribly early in the morning at 8 AM for the WordPress presentation, espescially in light of some of the great parties last night. Don’t forget to email me if you caught me right after the presentation and gave me your business card, as that way I’ll be sure to reply.
Here’s some of the feedback I’ve been seeing, I’ll update this post throughout the course of the day as feedback shows up on Technorati and Feedster and in the WordPress dashboard. If you have a post I’ve missed please leave a comment.
- San Jose Mercury News — “So it was Thursday, as 21-year-old blogger Matt Mullenweg navigated the hallways of San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, giving select corporate and other confidants a sneak peak at his latest offering: a special blogging software tool for companies.” BTW, Matt Marshall (who wrote the article) left a comment on this blog about the headline on the article.
- BBS05: Matt on WP — “It really looks like WP is going to make serious strides with these advances.”
- BBS05 – WordPress.com is Simply Awesome! — “Then add on the awesome drag-and-drop administration interface, an advanced WYSIWYG editor, and it seems too good to be true. But it gets even better, it’s free!”
- WordPress.com announced — We like to surprise people. 🙂
- Better Every Day — Owen posts more generally about new features of 1.6.
- Andrew is also following developments
- Flock and WordPress.com, nifty tools — “We say corporate, but anyone will be able to use it. “The point is to get everyone in the world a blog,” Mullenweg told us.”
- WordPress going up against Typepad — “This is going to be a hosted blog service a la TypePad, but of course using the WP platform.”
- WordPress dot com — “…can’t wait to get a hand on a (free?) blogging service with WP in it. Count me in.”
- WordPress.com – Social Blogging? — “It seems they will be using an invite only system, making sure that a it is controlled who gets to make a blog on the site. This will also create a community atmosphere similar to Live Journal and other such invite-mostly blogging sites.”
- WordPress Commercial Arm to Compete Against Typepad — “in my absense some 200 km North and internet free for some 28 odd hours, Matt Mullenweg, the guru and all round good guy behind WordPress has annonuced WordPress.com”
- WordPress starts hosted blogging service
- Are bloggers really selling bottles of air? (No!)
- WordPress.com — “Next thing I am dying to see is WordPress.com invitations being sold on E-Bay for hundreds of dollars or being exchanged for Pancakes and Apple Pies in colleges.”
- WordPress.com sure to be a hit!
- The Future of WordPress
Some photos from Flickr:
Photos by Kris.
Matt on Not-WordPress, mostly photos 
So does this mean there is now a for-profit company you’ve launched that’s behind wp.com? Which is fine but I haven’t seen any discussion of this aspect of the effort.
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I didn’t see any mention of that, except maybe in the Silicon Beat post: “Also, Mullenweg wants to turn WordPress into a real company, so that users have a place to go — an entity to hold accountable…more…”
What I meant to say was that things like support and service level agreements and all that jazz are very important to businesses and enterprises. That’s not terribly interesting to me personally, however. Those people still need someplace to go though, and I’m not sure what that looks like yet. If something that big were announced, we’d definitely make a big deal about it! This is just about getting more people blogging for whom WordPress is inaccessible right now.
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Very intriguing Matt. I’m thrilled that WordPress is making such a large stride, although I really don’t know what wordpress.com is all about yet. I know you have to be invited but that’s about it. Are you going to divulge any more details?
Congratulations are in order for Matt and the WordPress Team! Half a million downloads and I’m really looking forward to 1.6.
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wordpress.com == redhat.com
wordpress.org == fedora.redhat.com
right?
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wordpress.com = typepad.org
wordpress.org = information revolution yet to be categorized by any other.
Quite frankly, I believe the vast majority of the blogosphere have not realized what WordPress is doing/will do for the community as a whole. Not just for bloggers, but having the ability to aquire (freely) a piece of software that is highly customizable, very powerful at information distribution, and offers a small learning curve, WordPress gives everyone the ability to expand knowledge.
WHY I just said that, I have no clue…I guess that I’m just pumped about all the happenings in the WP community. 🙂
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As I have mentioned on my blog, so far everyone is clueless except MATT and those who have been involved in this project (Donncha???). Therefore saying that wp.com is striving to make money or comparing it with redhat/typepad would be wrong. Probably the best thing to do at the moment is to add this blog to your feed-reader and keep an eye on the updates (exactly what I am doing).
Hope to see some more progress soon.
Good job Matt, i’m sure you’ve got alot of people glued to their monitors 😛
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I, for one, welcome our new WordPress overlords.
That said, I really wish I knew what was going on. I guess we’ll find out sooner or later.
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Matt,
Great presentation. You convinced me that WordPress.com is the platform I believe I want to use for our new blog when it comes out. I will definitely be emailing you.
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Wow! WordPress.com – awesome! I can’t wait to see what the future holds.
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Wrote an article (such as it is) on future of WP.
Can find it here: http://www.monkeypup.org/the-future-of-wordpress/
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Thanks for the ping Matt. As I’m reflecting on WP.com this morning, I think it has a lot of potential as a challenge to Blogger and even TP and Blogware. The flexibilty you describe of making fan blogs or niche blogs spun off a central blog, that is going to be interesting to watch.
Can’t wait to try it.
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Even though it’s still in development, I’m already trying to publisize it on my blog.
http://www.kamigoroshi.net/archive/2005/08/20/781 and http://www.kamigoroshi.net/archive/2005/08/18/777
Though it’s pretty hard to picture how it’s going to be different from previously hosted sites that run on WordPress too like Blogsome.
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Eine Sammlung von deutschsprachigen Beiträgen zum Thema in der Medienpraxis.ch:
http://medienpraxis.ch/2005/08/20/news-von-wordpress/
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Hey, thanks for the mention 🙂 I appreciate it, and can’t wait to see what you do.
David
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So, I get my post mentioned by Matt himself 🙂 Thanks. I just realized it a couple of minute ago. Your post -this post- is fun since I finally see the face of.. you. Hey is that you? Ah, still so young but managed to do something cool like WP.Four thumbs up (that’s all I got). Goodluck with WP.com and all.
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Congrats, Matt! I saw you mentioned on Yahoo! News this morning… didn’t see that one in your list yet: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/sv/20050820/tc_siliconvalley/_www12425358
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That’s pretty amazimg, it’s a very positive article about the summit with Matt’s name being mentioned all along.
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Matt: This all sounds well and good, but one question: will users soon have to pay for Word Press (the software)? After all, sustaining all that bandwidth for wordpress.com is gonig to cost a pretty penny. I take it then the income generated by folks paying for wordpress.com will be enough to sustain it?
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Ed, of course not.
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I guess that the wordpress.com project is either heavily backed by sponsors or there will be ads in the future (I dont see any right now though)..
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My Journey to wordpress invitation…
http://abdul.beigetower.org/?p=128
So everyone, do not lose hope yet!
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WordPress is a great program. It’s no suprise that you are getting so much positive feedback.
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This piece of writing is genuinely a nice one it assists new net people, who
are wishing in favor of blogging.
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