WordPress is an example of mass customization. The mass lies in the number of blogs powered by WordPress. The customization is enabled by mechanisms such as plugins and themes.
If this sounds interesting, you might want to take a look at the slides for a presentation I’ll be giving on Monday. It’s at the World Conference on Mass Customization & Personalization (MCPC).
Before presenting, I will probably put the slides into PPT and edit them down. I am told that there will be PPT in the room, but there seems to be no guarantee of web access; given that we’ll be at MIT, I’m a little surprised things won’t be the other way round. We have been asked to keep presentations to 15 minutes to allow time for questions and answers.
In some ways, the presentation will stop just as it’s getting interesting. The last slide refers to the WordPress ecosystem, and identifies some of its inhabitants. Some of these inhabitants are vital because they enable customization by others. For example, the work of theme designers allows us to customize our blogs by choosing appropriate themes. We can then further customize our chosen themes, if we have access to CSS or other code.