The Social

Now here's one you don't see every day: Wordnik, which launched out of private beta on Monday and states its mission as "discovering all the words and everything about them." Taking the basic premise of a dictionary, Wordnik supplements each entry with Web 2.0's tastiest treats--relevant Flickr images, Twitter search matches, user-contributed tags and comments--and then invites users to add their own words, too.

Calling itself a "project" rather than a company, Wordnik's origins are sort of like a dot-com fairy tale. CEO Erin McKean, then serving as editor-in-chief of Oxford University Press' American dictionaries, was giving a talk at the elite TED conference when she raised an issue for lexicographers--dictionary scientists--that, in her opinion, the digital age hadn't solved yet.

"There are so many more words than dictionaries can handle," McKean said to CNET News about the issue she raised at TED. "There's no program for anyone to go out and try to find all the words. People have been conditioned to be more or less content with what they've got." She has a point: many online dictionary sites are little more than digital replicas of their print predecessors.

As is often the case with TED, some pretty important people were listening in, including Silicon Valley venture capitalist Roger McNamee--now one of the investors in Wordnik, which McKean promptly co-founded with two lexicographers and an engineer. Now the Bay Area-based company has six full-time employees, and is launching with 1.7 million words in its directory.

McKean says she isn't too concerned yet about dealing with the pranksters and vandals who give Wikipedia its more-than-occasional headaches ("people have tended to be well behaved with us, and we're not sure how long that's going to last") and says that copyright issues shouldn't be too much of a problem ("there's about 400 years of precedent in terms of fair use in a dictionary"). Right now the priority is expansion. On the way, McKean said, are smartphone apps, a developer API, and a cleaned-up version of Wordnik for kids to use.

The site's design and depth of information leave a little bit to be desired (it lacks the smooth, words-meet-visuals feel of something like news aggregator Daylife), and McKean said that bringing more interesting and unexpected information to Wordnik is also on the agenda.

But Wordnik faces one of the same concerns that pretty much any information- or search-focused start-up does: what if the likes of Google create a competing product? McKean said that Wordnik's advantage is its team's dedication. "Nobody's going to have as much money as Google," she said, "but nobody's going to be as interested in this as I am and my lexicographer colleagues are."

Now check it out and go look up "bacon."

Google announced on Friday the release of a number of updates to its Blogger publishing platform--well, sort of. The updates have gone into Blogger in Draft, the service's beta platform, with the expectation that they'll eventually become full features.

The updates will seem a bit humdrum for people who don't use Blogger, but for those who do, it's a set of important baby steps toward shaping the service to fit customer feedback. That's especially important for Google, as this is one niche of the Web where Mountain View doesn't have a huge lead: there is tough competition in the blog-publishing market, especially from the likes of WordPress and Six Apart.

Blogger users who want to be on the cutting edge will now be able to set their default "dashboard" to Blogger in Draft, and have the Blogger in Draft blog bookmarked as an easy reference. There's tighter integration of Google Gadgets, as well as a number of minor fixes to a recently redesigned dashboard.

But the "by popular demand" features are likely to gather more interest: five-star rating options on posts, much like those of Pownce; a revised post editor interface; support for Google Account logins and OpenID in comments; and perhaps most importantly, the ability to back up blog posts on a computer or export them to another blog.

Matt Mullenweg, creator of blogging platform WordPress, said in a blog post on Tuesday that "the future is social."

With that, he announced that WordPress parent company Automattic has hired designer and developer Andy Peatling, who has created a WordPress-based social network called BuddyPress.

BuddyPress, meanwhile, has become part of Automattic's arsenal. The project's home page has been replaced with an Automattic logo and the teaser "BuddyPress will transform a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a social-network platform."

Mullenweg was a featured speaker at last week's Future of Web Apps conference in Miami, where talk of standards like OpenSocial and OpenID dominated the rhetoric.

Those same themes seem to be integral to WordPress' interest in the open-source BuddyPress. "Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly free and open -ource alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape," Mullenweg wrote in Tuesday's blog post.

WordPress hinted at some social undercurrents to the service when it launched WordPress Prologue, essentially a Twitter-like "microblogging" service for groups to communicate privately on the WordPress platform.

Earlier this year, Mullenweg announced that Automattic had raised $29.5 in venture funding, and several bloggers speculated that it would be used, in part, to hire more employees.

The latest Automattic hire likely won't have to go through too much company training, as he's been a longtime devotee to the company's products. "I've been all-consumed in WordPress for the past two years now, (and) I think almost every single site I've built since working as a freelancer has used WordPress in some way," Peatling wrote in a blog post Tuesday. "To get the opportunity to concentrate fully on WordPress every day, and also the chance to help mold WordPress in new ways, is a fantastic one not to be missed."

MIAMI--The way people have been talking about e-mail at the Future of Web Apps conference, you'd think it were a cell phone carrier or a domestic airline. It's antiquated, it's backward, and everybody hates it.

Kevin Marks, a Google engineer and Technorati veteran, said in a talk about the company's OpenSocial project and Social Graph APIs that e-mail is a "strange legacy idea."

"E-mail has died away for a group of users. For the younger generation, they don't use e-mail," he said, talking about the young Web users who have started to abandon e-mail for Facebook messaging and mobile texting. "They see it as this noisy spam-filled thing that annoys them every day...they see it as how you talk to the university, how you talk to the bank." Marks pointed to technologies like OpenID that promote the notion that online identities these days are defined by so much more than e-mail addresses--URLs and social-networking profiles, to name a few.

Marks wasn't the only one expounding upon e-mail's suckiness. Earlier in the day, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg inferred that overwhelming volumes of spam were making Web users explore options other than e-mail.

And when a lively group of Web 2.0 elite (including Mullenweg, Digg's Kevin Rose, Pownce's Leah Culver, and Flickr's Cal Henderson) tackled a panel led by TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld that involved creating the concept for a new Web app in 45 minutes, their end result was a product that would make e-mail less of a headache by making sure that users reply to everything. (It was done in 45 minutes, so the specifics weren't totally ironed out.)

To top it all off, when I had a meeting with Marks on Friday morning, we used Twitter direct messaging rather than e-mail to confirm the time and location.

That was before Twitter suffered a downage when the start-up's architect, Blaine Cook, was giving a talk later in the day at FOWA and his phone kept ringing with calls from the site's server administrators. Twitter's unreliability is well-known, and certainly calls into question the fact that all these messaging start-ups and social-networking features that are supposedly killing e-mail still might not be stable enough to overhaul the way we communicate.

The recent high-profile e-mail provider crashes, however, provide a counterpoint.

This post was updated at 4:49 PM PT with a clarification from Matt Mullenweg.

MIAMI--"I'm Matt Mullenweg, and I'm famous for eating 108 Chicken McNuggets and surviving," the eccentric 24-year-old WordPress founder said in his talk at the Future of Web Apps conference, explaining that he's no longer continually the No. 1 "Matt" in a Google search because the dancing viral-video star "Where The Hell Is Matt?" gives him a run for his money.

At FOWA, Mullenweg was slated to talk about both the physical and psychological "architecture" of WordPress, which has gained both positive buzz and popularity for being simply constructed, easy to use, and remarkably efficient.

"Scale is what separates us from the other industries of the world," he explained, saying that it's only in the technology business that a tiny entrepreneurial team can create something used by millions of people. WordPress, Mullenweg said, powers 2,523,000 blogs, gets 135 million global unique visitors, and has only 19 full-time employees.

Matt Mullenweg

(Credit: Wordpress)

"All these old-media companies are adding blogs like it's going out of style," he said, talking about how WordPress now powers blogs for The New York Times, CNN, and Fox News ("unfortunately," he added on that last one).

Mullenweg added later in a conversation that he didn't intend "unfortunately" to sound the way it did and that he meant no offense to WordPress' major media clients.

He had quite a bit of advice for the audience. "Be the person in the support forums who's answering everybody's questions," Mullenweg advised start-up entrepreneurs in the room. If you don't look like you're hard-core about your company and its users, he said, you won't build up a following.

It was a pretty geek speak-intensive talk, with Mullenweg explaining to the developer-filled concert hall how WordPress handles server and bandwidth demands, and how to take advantage of systems like Memcached, which was originally developed for social-media pioneer LiveJournal. But he also expounded a bit on the Web 2.0 landscape and some of the issues it faces--like spam, the ugly side of the open-social Web. WordPress has deleted more than 800,000 "splogs," or spam blogs, for example.

Spammers are "the terrorists of Web 2.0," Mullenweg said. "They come into our communities and take advantage of our openness." He suggested that people may have moved away from e-mail and toward messaging systems like Facebook messaging and Twitter to get away from spam. But with all those "zombie bites" showing up in his Facebook in-box, he explained, the spammers are pouncing on openness once again.

He also has a pretty nontraditional view of ad revenues, the supposed cash coffer of new-media sites. "Most of you have never, and will never, seen an ad on WordPress.com," Mullenweg said, referring to WordPress.org's free blog-hosting arm. "We decided to show ads only on certain pages, only to the people who were sort of random drive-by visitors...if you use Firefox, you'll never see an ad, no matter what, mostly because I like Firefox."

Automattic, the company best-known for blog publishing software WordPress, has raked in $29.5 million in Series B funding. Originally reported on several blogs, the funding round was confirmed by Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg in his personal blog Tuesday evening.

The most notable of the investors is the New York Times Co., which joins existing Automattic investors Polaris Ventures, True Ventures, and Radar Ventures. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Automattic turned down an acquisition offer several months ago from a "larger Internet company." Mullenweg's only apparent reference to this in his blog post was his statement that WordPress had become so successful that choosing between the "approach of serious acquisition or majority-stake investments" became an obvious next step.

Automattic has about 18 employees, according to the Journal, and also operates several lesser-known software products like forum software BBPress and spam management product Akismet. But WordPress is its centerpiece, powering around 2.2 million blogs--active and otherwise--from personal blogs to the digital properties of high-profile media publications like The New York Times, Fortune, and CNN. The Journal hinted that some of the $29.5 million will be used to allow some early employees and investors to cash out; GigaOm's Om Malik suggested that the company may also hire more engineers, anticipating continued growth.

Mullenweg's blog post seemed to confirm this speculation: "Automattic is now positioned to execute on our vision of a better Web not just in blogging, but expanding our investment in antispam, identity, wikis, forums, and more -- small, open source pieces, loosely joined with the same approach and philosophy that has brought us this far."