Andrew Mager posted an illustrated play-by-play of Saturday's WordCamp, a conference devoted to the popular open-source blogging platform WordPress. According to Mager's report, the hosted version of WordPress has 2.3 million new blogs in 12 months and 35 million posts, and more than 6.5 billion page views.
(Credit:
Andrew Mager)
Of particular interest for the WordPress crowd is BuddyPress, a set of plug-ins that brings Facebook-like features, such as friends, groups, private messaging, status updates, and extended profiles, to the blogging platform. (WordPress competitor Six Apart also recently introduced a social dimension to its Movable Type platform.)
BuddyPress is slated for 1.0 status in December 2008.
(Credit: Andrew Mager)As Mager reported, unlike the popular social networks, BuddyPress isn't a closed environment: "Why do we need another social network? BuddyPress is not another "data silo" like Facebook and MySpace. It's mission is to be more open source, handle better control of data, give people better choices, and build greater support for open standards."
Being more open isn't a necessarily going to move people out of Facebook, MySpace, Bebo or other semi-permeable walled gardens. However, the combination of emerging open standards, such as OpenSocial, and the growing WordPress and Six Apart communities will have an impact on embedding a social dimension into the fabric of every application.
This weekend, hundreds of bloggers and Web developers gathered at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco for the second-annual WordCamp conference.
Day 1 was dedicated to the content producers, and offered advice on how to be a better writer. We heard from John C. Dvorak, Om Malik, and Matt Cutts from Google.
Day 2 focused on the development and future of WordPress. Matt Mullenweg wrapped up the conference with the State of the Word address, describing how far WordPress has come in just a year, as well as a sneak preview of the newly designed Admin section.
I covered the event on my own (WordPress-powered) blog, AndrewMager.com.
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