http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/impressions/2010/06/15/son-gutenberg The Son of Gutenberg How WordPress changed the way we publish. By Marion Maneker Posted Wednesday, June 16, 2010 - 7:47am
A year ago, Justin Halpern was an underemployed comedy writer who had to move back into his parents’ home in San Diego. Today, he’s got 1.4 million Twitter followers, the No. 1 book on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, and a CBS sitcom starring William Shatner. All it took was writing down quotes from his father that he tweets out as “Shit My Dad Says.” Technology and social media are redrawing the roadmap to authorial success. And for every Justin Halpern, there are 10,000 professional writers wondering how to turn blogs, microblogs, and Twitterfeeds into media empires, especially now that their magazines, newspapers, and media organizations are contracting at an alarming rate. Blogs, of course, are the first refuge for professional writers fleeing the withering establishment media, and for hordes of would-be scribes finding their own voice. For these multitudes, WordPress.com has become the 21st-century equivalent of Gutenberg’s printing press. As the leading blogging software, WordPress is an essential tool in the transformation of media. WordPress.com hosts 11 million blogs pumping out the enthusiasms, opinions, and ideas of its authors to 256 million unique monthly users. Unlike social media giants Facebook and Twitter, WordPress doesn’t sport a multibillion-dollar valuation or a murderer’s row of VC investors. That’s because WordPress itself is open-source code that anyone with skill could make his or her own. (They just can’t call it WordPress.) That’s not to say that the creators of WordPress are altruists. They’re making money too. Matt Mullenweg, the 26-year-old who gathered WordPress together seven years ago after a yearlong stint at Cnet, founded a company called Automattic in 2005 to sell services around WordPress. As CEO, Mullenweg hired Toni Schneider, an ex-Yahoo! executive who ran the site’s developer network and was the former CEO of Oddpost, a paid e-mail service that was acquired by Yahoo! for $30 million in 2004. Together they raised $31 million from investors, including a chunk from the New York Times. A profitable company, Automattic runs with a small staff of 60, mostly developers, who work out of diverse locations on three continents with no corporate offices (you can see their names and locations here). The company is an ephemeral presence. Automattic employees coordinate their work over an open IRC channel and get together regularly in different cities around the world. That puts Mullenweg on the road more than half the year, camping out in hotel suites with his colleagues as they collaborate in a circle with laptops open. This may seem like a strange modus operandi for an outfit that supports some of the most heavily trafficked and straitlaced news sites. But you don’t have to be a bohemian to appreciate the power of blogging. Certainly, CNN, BBC, Time, Fortune, the NFL, CBS Radio, Rosetta Stone, TechCrunch, LinkedIn, Discovery, the SEC, and GigaOm think so. They all host their blogs on WordPress.com. Many other companies also use the open-source code to run their own sites hosted on their own servers. (clip) _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
