Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on October 15, 2008 – 10:50 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Matt Mullenweg’s Automattic, the company behind the WordPress blogging platform, has announced the acquisition of PollDaddy, a company that provides embeddable poll and survey widgets, as reported on Mashable. Mullenweg writes on his personal blog:
For a year or two now, I’ve been minorly obsessed with polls and surveys as a method of lightweight interaction that engages casual users of your website and also can get you some really fun data to play with. I’ve also mentioned at a few WordCamps that a polling plugin is one of the top 10 WordPress plugins in the world. Polls are really popular with WordPress users.
As we started to look at building out our own service for this, it became more obvious that, while on the surface it’s a very simple problem, there’s a lot of hidden complexity and opportunities for some really powerful features under the hood. There are probably a dozen companies addressing this space right now, but as we started to survey the space I was struck by how often I’d see this “PollDaddy” thing pop up.
Apart from basic polls, PollDaddy aims to provide a fuller suite of data-collecting widgets. PollDaddy distributes a new online survey tool and a more generic form generator that is capable of making contact forms. They offer a nifty quiz generator as well. All of these new embeddable tools will build upon the success of the company’s ubiquitous poll widget, which has attracted 70,000 users and is viewed across the web 70 million times per month. According to the company, about 1 million polls have been created and 195 million votes have been collected to date.
PollDaddy started out as a two-man, self-funded operation based in Ireland. The team (Eoin and Lenny) will be joining Automattic and keep working on the product, and they have stated that the service will keep on supporting MySpace, Ning, Blogger, Typepad, Hi5, Orkut, Piczo, etc.
Automattic’s funding exceeds $30 million, which was raised in two rounds and includes notable investors like True Ventures and the New York Times. Earlier this year, Automattic acquired the blog comment plugin Intense Debate.
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Written on May 30, 2008 – 8:59 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Patrick and me are currently waiting for our morning flight to Greece. We are attending Greek Blogger Camp 2008 at the island Los. We will be staying at the fabulous Ios Palace hotel on the golden sand beaches of Mylopotas. The hotel offers free Wi-Fi in the conference area and next to the pool.
No, we are not complaining!
I’m not just attending the conference to blog about it. I am also one of the international speakers there next to Timothy Ferris (”productivity guru” and author of The 4-Hour Workweek) and Matt Mullenweg (founding developer of WordPress and founder of Automattic, the business behind WordPress.com and Akismet.), to name a few. I’m very proud to be mentioned in the same sentence as those two guys.
We will blog about the conference here (Tagged: gbc08) and we will post photos to Flickr (Tagged: gbc08) regularly too.
Written on April 25, 2008 – 7:12 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Matt Mullenweg
Matt Mullenweg just told the audience at Web 2.0 Expo that Wordpress.com has launched a “(possibly) related functions” option. Mullenweg: “We have over 10 million pageviews a day to permalink pages. After you’ve read the article on a permalink page, you might get lost due to the bad navigation. It isn’t a good experience.” So Mullenweg and his 19 Automattic employees developed a function that suggests possibly related articles from your own blog, and then from some other blogs who have also turned the function on. “It’s like advertising, but with content”, Mullenweg said.
Automattic teamed up with Sphere - the widget service who does the same for the whole blogosphere - and is planning to offer it to the self-hosted Wordpress.org blogs too. Mullenweg believes the service will be successful, as “who hasn’t lost a day due to the YouTube’s related videos?”. I absolutely dig this move by Wordpress - as obvious at it is - since it allow smaller bloggers to get their writings out there. It’s the democratization of the medium and makes sure good quality content doesn’t get lost.
By the way, check out this cool photo blog theme called “Monotone“. It adjusts the page to the color and width of the photo and Mullenweg seemed to be pretty proud of it.
Written on February 19, 2008 – 9:54 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
We Love WordPress
Last week I was browsing through our WordPress Admin here and noticed the “Hello Dolly” plugin. This is a plugin that comes pre-installed with every WordPress install. When activated you will randomly see a lyric from Hello, Dolly in the upper right of your admin screen on every page. As you can imagine this isn’t a very useful plugin. Then I decided to take the “Hello Dolly” plugin and make it do something useful: display tips.
I wrote a blog post on my personal blog and sent an update to Twitter asking for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tips. Then I opened up a Google Spreadsheet where people could insert and edit the tips. Within 30 minutes I had received hundreds of tips from several friendly SEO experts (complete list below). Together we wrote, collected and fine-tuned more than 250 tips. We ended up with a nice collection of exactly “100 SEO Tips” which is also the title of the Plugin we launch today.
Even if you know a lot about SEO this plugin is still fun to install. It reminds you, casually, of what you already know but sometimes forget. So, install it, share it, link back here and if you have a few tips of your own please do share them with us so we can include them in the next version of the plugin.
Download: http://thenextweb.org/100-seo-tips.zip
Install: Download the plugin, unzip, upload to server in directory /wp-content/plugins/ and then activate in Wordpress Management. Tips will appear in top right corner of WordPress admin.
Please let us know if you installed it by leaving a comment here with your blog url! Or even better, blog about it and and send us a trackback.
Special thanks to the following people who helped collect the tips: David Petherick, Joop Dorresteijn, Nikki Pilkington , Joery Bruijntjes, Gerben Bouwhuis and Eduard Blacquière .
Written on January 21, 2008 – 2:19 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Matt Mullenweg has just announced that upload space at Wordpress.com has been increased 60 times from 50 Megabytes to 3 Gigabytes. Mullenweg writes “To get half that much space (1GB) at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year. We’re doing the same thing for free”.
Previously the 50 megabyte limit made it necessary for a lot of serious bloggers to host Wordpress on their own services. With this upgrade they might be tempted to start hosting at Wordpress.com again. And it IS tempting to move away from a dedicated server to the Wordpress hosting platform. As Mullenweg notes “Over the past year we’ve developed our file infrastructure, replication, backup, caching, and S3-backed storage to the point where we don’t feel like we need to artificially limit what you folks are able to upload just to keep up with growth”.
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
