WordPress.com Builds Inroads
February 9, 2010
WordPress.com has recently added a couple of inbound highways. A couple of weeks ago, Brian Colinger announced the Vox importer. Today, he announced the Posterous importer.
The particularly interesting thing about these two roads is that they come from very different directions. Hence the implication is that wherever you are, WordPress.com might be a better place for you. Vox bills itself as “everything you want in a blog.” I don’t think that it has lived up to Six Apart’s hopes for it.
Posterous, on the other hand, bills itself as “the dead simple place to post everything.” As Jennifer Van Grove points out at Mashable, Posterous has offered an import from WordPress for some time.
I’d be interested to see a traffic report on export/import and migration between the various blogging and other social media services.
Conversion Rates and Funnels
February 7, 2010
The freemium model relies on enough users paying for premium services to meet the cost of servicing all users, including those who use take the free option. One of the key metrics for a freemium service is conversion rate from free to premium.
Toni Schneider notes that this rate is about 2% for WordPress.com, for Box.net, for Evernote, and for many other freemium services. He wonders if there is some kind of “2% rule” at work.
This reminded me of Funnel Analysis, as described in a Mashable guest post by Tim Trefren. Funnel analysis is about conversion rates, is a more general sense. A funnel is defined in terms of user actions, such as visiting a site, signing up for a service, becoming a premium/pay user, and so on.
Conversion rate, in this broader sense, is the percentage of users taking a particular action. Hence a firm’s funnel has multiple conversion rates/actions as it narrows. A freemium service using funnel analysis would probably define a payment action, marking the transition from a free user to a premium customer.
Tim is CEO of Mixpanel, a web analytics startup. (See Mixpanel for more about Funnel Analysis and the API.) Mixpanel itself uses the freemium model; I signed up for a free account.
Funnels can be transparent: a firm can publish its conversion rates. Funnels could be aggregated: Mixpanel could, with the cooperation of its client firms, publish aggregate data on various conversion rates. It could make it worth the clients’ while by, for example, offering early or deep looks at the aggregated data.
Avatars and Other Ambiguity
February 6, 2010
I was looking forward to the Avatar movie. I use the past tense, not because the movie in question has already come out – it hasn’t – but because I have qualms about the choice of director and about the casting strategy. You may have gathered that I’n not referring to Avatar by James Camereon.
I’m referring to The Last Airbender, the live-action movie based on the excellent animated TV show Avatar: The Last Airbender. And I’m leading up to other ambiguities.
WordPress is like the movies: there’s more than one avatar to keep track of. An avatar can represent a user, or it can represent a blog. I posted about the difference just over a year ago. I was reminded of the difference when I decided that my avatar should be the square crop of snowbaby’s face, and the blog’s should be the Eggman.
Here’s the original photo of snowbaby, who we built yesterday, before the snowstorm. He’s now buried, since the snow is taller than he is. His eyes are the tops of a couple of strawberries. In case that raises the question of what happened to the rest of the berries: the kids ate one eye each.
Cliqset Clips and Evernote Notes
February 4, 2010
Social memory integration sounds pretty impressive. But what does it mean? Leena Rao at TechCrunch uses the term to describe the recently-announced integration between Cliqset and Evernote.
Leena’s post made me get round to starting a Cliqset account and linking it to some of my web activity (e.g., this blog, Evernote, Flickr). Cliqset shows me the activity streams of those I follow.
The integration with Evernote allows me easily to make a note of an interesting item from one of those streams. I get a clipping of that item in the form of a note in my default Evernote notebook.
I am rather underwhelmed by this, even with my interest in Evernote, and despite the enthusiastic posts at TechCrunch, at the Evernote blog, and elsewhere.
Some of the reasons I’m unimpressed are minor (if I wanted to Cliq-clip to Evernote, I’d like to be able to specify the folder into which the clippings should go) or otherwise unimportant (I’m feeling grumpy today).
But there is a bigger reason: Twitter, the huge service with the little tweets. Many Cliqset streams consist mainly of tweets. Few tweets are clip-worthy (with very rare exceptions such as CEO resignation haiku). Tweets that make me want to clip are usually pointers to real content, rather than worthy content in their own right.
I see this as a problem, not just for “CliqNote,” but for Cliqset more generally. Many people use Twitter as the center of their social media universe: to capture their own activity streams, and to follow the streams of others. I wish it wasn’t so (for reasons that belong in a separate post), but I think it is – and that doesn’t leave much room for services like Cliqset.
The most prominent Cliqset-like service is FriendFeed. Indeed, Cliqset “aims to be a less clunky version of FriendFeed” (that’s Leena quoting Darren Bounds, president of Cliqset). Perhaps it too will be acquired, then neglected.
Automattic and Other Anniversaries
February 4, 2010
Toni Schneider has been CEO of Automattic (almost?) as long as that company has existed: that’s four years, plus a few days. Happy anniversary to Toni, Matt, and the rest of Automattic.
Toni plans to celebrate by starting a series of posts on lessons learned from the four years. He specifies three topics: open source business models; distributed companies; and internet scale services. I’d say that’s an excellent list of three.
I’ll suggest to Toni a fourth, and a sort of fifth. The fourth topic is integration. We don’t get all our web tools from Automattic/WordPress, and we never will. How does Automattic work on making WordPress and its other projects play well with others (e.g., Flickr, Twitter) in order to present an integrated web experience for customers?
The sort of fifth topic is also integration, sort of. Each of Toni’s original list of three topics is interesting in its own right, but becomes even more interesting in combination with one or both of the other two. For example, what has Automattic learned from other open source projects about distributed work and about scalable services?
I’ll mention just one more Automattic topic before moving on to other anniversaries. Toni is a VC as well as a CEO. What’s the exit strategy for Automattic? I mention this topic because I think that others are very interested in it, not because I think that there is much chance that Toni will post about it.
Other recent anniversaries include:
- Largehearted Boy: the excellent music and lit blog turned eight recently, making it venerable as well as venerated among blogs.
- Me and Flickr: five years last month. I’ll celebrate my changing my WordPress.com gravatar to my Eggman in Squared Circle photo/crop, and by posting a photo of our yard in the snow. Which reminds me…
- The four of us and the house in Silver Spring: two months yesterday. Here’s my one-month post. Since then, posting about local exploring has migrated over to Andrew’s Wanderings. AW is another WordPress blog, hosted by WanderNote, rather than by Automattic.
WordPress Clients: Just the Factual
February 3, 2010
The recent release of the WordPress for Android app prompted me to look into how many WordPress clients there are. After checking the page at WordPress.com and the page at WordPress.org, and realizing that there are yet more clients than those pages list, I concluded that there are exactly… lots of WordPress clients.
If I’m not being accurate, I can at least be Factual. I mean Factual in the sense of the startup that facilitates creation of open database tables. An investor likens Factual to “Wikipedia for structured database-like information.” Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch noted that there are “other efforts pursuing similar ambitions.”
Since I was thinking of putting together a table of WordPress clients at the time I read about Factual, I signed up for the service and used it to create the table there. Factual tables, like many other things on the web, can be embedded – but not here at WordPress.com.
So I’ll link to the WordPress Clients table. It’s open, so you can read it and, if you get yourself a Factual account, contribute to it.
WordPress for Android Works Offline
February 3, 2010
I think it works offline, but it’s better to check than to assume or believe. It’s allowed me to write, categorize, and tag this.
Now to save this post, bring the Android out of Airplane mode, and post.
Coincidence? I think not
February 3, 2010
Two headlines, same story.
- Wall Street Journal Busts Down Its Paywall For A Day: that’s The Business Insider.
- Acura Sponsors WSJ.com Today as Headlines Slam Toyota: that’s Philtered.
I have to say that Christian DiCarlo, posting at his personal blog Philtered, has the more apt headline, and that his coverage following the headline is excellent.
To answer the question in my own headline, I certainly don’t consider it coincidence that Acura is giving us the gift of WSJ during the Toyota gas pedal episode. Toyota may be trying to Tylenol its way out of this one, but Acura is adding to its rival’s headache.
I Love to Say: I Told You So
February 2, 2010
I noticed a few months ago that the URL for an official Android app was in use, although hidden from public view. Well, we now have lift-off.
I’m using the new app to post this. I’ll edit to add links later.
Now, getting to the post on a laptop, I’m surprised to find that it wasn’t published. I thought I’d told the Android app to publish, not just to upload. It did seem to be working with a local, and locally-savable copy, which is good. Anyway, as threatened, here are some links:
- The post at Mashable where I first saw the news today, and from which I’m borrowing the WordDroid image.
- The announcement post on the WordPress for Android blog.
Popular Themes at WordPress.com
February 1, 2010
Which WordPress themes are most widely used? That question is broad and difficult to answer. Luckily, there are related questions that are more focused and easier to answer. For example: which themes are most popular at WordPress.com? which have the most downloads from WordPress.org?
This post is about the answer to the first of these more specific questions. If I, as an admin of this or any other WordPress.com blog, browse themes I can request that the themes be ordered by popularity.
This is the current list of most popular themes at WordPress.com: ChaoticSoul, MistyLook, Ocean Mist, Cutline, Freshy, Black-LetterHead, Contempt, Ambiru, Digg 3 Column, Benevolence, Tarski, Andreas04, Solipsus, Blix, Rounded, and PressRow.
The first thing that struck me was the absence of Kubrick, which has been the default theme for new WordPress blogs for a while now. I suspect that there are indeed many Kubrick blogs, created but never really used, that the popularity algorithm excludes. I’ll add that Contempt is a close relative of Kubrick.
Second, it looks as though the typical popular theme has a custom header, and a sidebar on the right.
Third, only 3 or these 16 themes – Black-LetterHead, Tarski, and Blix – are currently in the free themes directory at WordPress.org. That’s unfortunate, since it’s particularly easy to install a theme from that directory at a self-hosted WordPress blog: you don’t need to leave the dashboard to use FTP.
I started looking into the initial question (Which WordPress themes are most widely used?) when I realized that using Typekit with WordPress is very theme-specific.
