News flash: Automattic has acquired Gravatar. Congrats to Tom Werner for building a great product. Gravatar is a great fit for our expanding set of Automattic services and I’m looking forward to working on it.
Blog
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Biodiesel in the garage
I am now the proud owner of a biodiesel gas pump in my garage: Two 55 gallon barrels of biodiesel with a handcrank that allows me to fill up my Landcruiser right in my driveway.
This came about because the SFBiofuels coop’s biodiesel pump got shut down (due to neighbors complaining), which has made getting biodiesel in San Francisco somewhat of a pain. The coop apparently has plans/permits in the works for 4 potential new locations around San Francisco, but in the meantime I decided to take matters in my own hands. I called up Peoples Fuel, they gave me a quote for a biodiesel home setup (about $400), came out to my house to install it, and filled up the barrels right from their biodiesel delivery truck. They’ll come back for refills anytime I run out. Peoples Fuel have been great to deal with. Apparently they deliver/quality monitor biodiesel for lots of places around town, including the SF Zoo (I believe they run 100% biodiesel) and the SF city buses (they’ve just switched their entire fleet to B20, 20% biodiesel).
PS: Before Diane let me put a gas station in our house, she asked me to look into the safety issues. I’m happy to report that biodiesel has a flash point of over 200 degrees Celsius (I think that means that the garage will burn down before the biodiesel will ignite). It’s also been shown to be 10x less dangerous than table salt when ingested – I’ve no plans to try this, but apparently it’s safe to swallow.
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Congrats to Maya’s Mom
Maya’s Mom, a startup I got introduced to by Caterina Fake and that True Ventures invested in, has gotten acquired by Babycenter.com (who are owned by Johnson & Johnson). A big congrats to Ann Crady and the great team at Maya’s Mom! It was a pleasure working with them, even though it seems brief. They got started about a year and half ago, pulled together a great group of people and launched their parenting advice site late last year. What impressed me about Maya’s Mom was how well they seemed to mesh as a team with great skills and attitudes all around, and how they continually and rapidly adapted their product based on what their users told them and what they saw happening in the market. I look forward to following their growth and success story as their site and technology get opened up to a much larger audience. Congratulations!
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A nice long summer
Sorry about not posting for a while. It’s been a nice, long, busy summer. I traveled a lot seeing family in Santa Barbara and Switzerland (some snapshots below) and in between got to see the Automattic gang at WordCamp and our team meetup. Seems like I got to enjoy two of the benefits of being in a virtual company this summer: The ability to travel and work/check-in from anywhere with my family and the pleasure of spending some focused time with my co-workers in a fun, beautiful and memorable setting.
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WordCamp 2007
Registration for WordCamp 2007 is now open. Matt has put together a really great program this year. I’m very much looking forward to the conference and connecting with WordPress users and contributors.
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Raanan joins Automattic
Raanan Bar Cohen is the latest addition to the Automattic team! He is a super talented business guy who has helped companies like Dow Jones and Time Inc move into the world of blogging and RSS. His experience is a great fit for us as we look for ways to meet the accelerating demand for WordPress among big media publishers. Welcome Raanan 🙂
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Lightning
Corel has released a new beta of their WordPerfect Lightning product. Lightning is a lightweight document and image management app that now supports publishing to blogs:
Our first supported blog platform is WordPress, and I think it’s a great fit. WordPress’ reputation among serious bloggers is unparalleled, but more importantly, its open SDK and strong support for images makes it easy for users to blog pretty much whatever information they’ve collected in Lightning.
As an aside, this is a good example of self-serve business development enabled by open APIs. Corel simply decided that they wanted to support WordPress and used our open APIs to do it. No business development back and forth, no contracts, no friction. They just implemented it and contacted us a couple of days ago to give us a heads up.
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One million blogs
Sometime next week, someone will create the one millionth blog on WordPress.com!
I hope you’ll join us this Monday to help celebrate this momentous occasion (and as if a million blogs wasn’t enough reason to rejoice, we can also toast the WordPress 2.2 release and the fourth anniversary of the first release of WordPress).
Please allow me to use this opportunity to brag a little about WordPress.com:
- Quantcast says WordPress.com is the #39 site in the US;
- Alexa says we are the #96 site in the world (our current audience reach puts us in some nice company: ahead of sites like Typepad and Digg, and coming up on Flickr and Photobucket);
- Google Trends says WordPress is the “most searched” of the blog platforms.
- It took us 17 months to get to one million blogs (BTW, this is just counting blogs Automattic hosts at WordPress.com, it’s not counting the millions of copies of WordPress downloaded from WordPress.org and hosted on third party web hosts); and
- Our 1 million blogs attracted an audience of 44 million readers last month, which seems like a healthy blog to reader ratio (i.e. lots of people are actually reading these blogs which is arguably more important than how many of them have been created).
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AllThingsD.com launches (powered by WordPress)
Allthingsd.com, a great looking new site by famous Walt Street Journal journalists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg launched today. We’re particularly excited about this project because they chose WordPress MU for their publishing platform and we are VIP hosting the site for them on our WordPress.com server infrastructure. The site includes four separate blogs (including one by John Paczkowski of Good Morning Silicon Valley fame), lots of video, guest bloggers, and free access to a couple of years worth of Walt Mossberg WSJ columns (I think this is a first).
A great team was assembled to build this site. The design is by Mule Design, implementation by Alex King and Adam Tow, hosting by Automattic and project management by the Allthingsd and Dow Jones teams as well as Brian Oberkirch.
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Sad statistic
Last night, I went to a small Human Rights Watch event (check them out if you are looking to help out a good cause – they are truly working to make the world a better place). Here’s a saddening statistic that someone mentioned: Apparently there are 12 documented cases of children serving life prison sentences without the possibility of parole outside the United States. Inside the US, there are over 2,000 such cases.
