Mullenweg announces (possibly) related items funtion

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.