#SMOOC Day 7: The Wordpress Economy

Q&A with Alexia Tsotsis, Writer TechCrunch

Last year WordPress carried out a global survey, asking basic questions about what people are doing with WordPress. Over 18,000 people responded from all over the world, making it a good indicator of how people are faring in the WordPress economy.

This is a long, two-part article so if you want to get where you’re going quickly, these are the sections:

- The Stats
- Some Words from the Founders
- Themes
- Plugins
- Services

Blogging is what WordPress was made for, so it’s not surprising to see it on a list of WordPress businesses. But what I’m interested in is not whether someone can make money out of a blog, but whether a blog about WordPress forms part of the WordPress Economy. There are a few of them around, with WPBeginner WPMU.org, WPTavern, and WPCandy, all generating a significant amount of traffic. People want to learn about WordPress, and a WordPress blog is often a good place to get started.

WPLift is run by Oli Dale, a UK-based Web designer. While other blogs were focusing on news or tips, Oli wanted to create a WordPress blog that focused on big roundup posts and in-depth tutorials. He already had experience growing a blog to millions of pageviews a month, so he decided to put this experience to work creating WPLift.

Ever since launching, WPLift has grown almost every month. What’s interesting is that Oli publishes monthly stats round-ups and income reports, so that visitors can see how much income has been generated through the blog.

What to do? Well, Textpattern looks like everything I could ever want, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be licensed under something politically I could agree with. Fortunately, b2/cafelog is GPL, which means that I could use the existing codebase to create a fork, integrating all the cool stuff that Michel would be working on right now if only he was around.

The work would never be lost, as if I fell of the face of the planet a year from now, whatever code I made would be free to the world, and if someone else wanted to pick it up they could.

I’ve decided that this the course of action I’d like to go in, now all I need is a name. What should it do? Well, it would be nice to have the flexibility of MovableType, the parsing of TextPattern, the hackability of b2, and the ease of setup of Blogger. Someday, right?

WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a dynamic content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet's "top 1 million" websites and as of August 2011 manages 22% of all new websites. WordPress is currently the most popular CMS in use on the Internet.

It was first released on May 27, 2003, by Matt Mullenweg as a fork of b2/cafelog. As of December 2011, version 3.0 had been downloaded over 65 million times.

Matthew Charles "Matt" Mullenweg (born January 11, 1984 in Houston, Texas) is an online social media entrepreneur, web developer and musician living in San Francisco, California. He is best known for developing the free and open source web software, WordPress, which powers 15% of the web and is now managed by The WordPress Foundation.

Mullenweg attended the University of Houston and majored in Political Science before he dropped in 2004 to pursue a job at CNET Networks. In late 2005, he quit his job at CNET Networks and founded Automattic, the business behind WordPress.com (which provides free WordPress blogs and other services), Akismet, Gravatar, VaultPress, IntenseDebate, Polldaddy, and more. His professional blog is ma.tt, a domain hack.

I want to recognize and applaud the courage and foresight of Automattic’s board, investors, and legal counsel who made this possible: Mike Hirshland, Phil Black, Tony Conrad, Toni Schneider, Gunderson Dettmer. I’d also like to thank Matt Bartus of Dorsey & Whitney for their counsel on the Foundation side. The WordPress brand has grown immeasurably in the past 5 years and it’s not often you see a for-profit company donate one of their most valuable core assets and give up control. However, I know in my heart that this is the right thing for the entire WordPress community, and they followed me on that. It wasn’t easy, but things worth doing seldom are.

Automattic might not always be under my influence, so from the beginning I envisioned a structure where for-profit, non-profit, and not-just-for-profit could coexist and balance each other out. It’s important for me to know that WordPress will be protected and that the brand will continue to be a beacon of open source freedom regardless of whether any company is as benevolent as Automattic has been thus far. It’s important to me to know that we’ve done the right thing. Hopefully, it’s important to you, too, and you’ll continue your support of WordPress, the WordPress Foundation, and Automattic’s products and services.

Automattic, Inc. is a web development corporation founded in August 2005. It is most notable for WordPress.com (a free blogging service), as well as its contributions to WordPress (open source blogging software).

On September 23, 2008, Automattic announces acquiring IntenseDebate.Two months later, on November 15, 2008, Automattic acquired PollDaddy.

On September 9, 2010, Automattic gave the WordPress trademark and control over bbPress and BuddyPress to the WordPress Foundation.

The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software.

The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the software projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come. As part of this mission, the Foundation will be responsible for protecting the WordPress, WordCamp, and related trademarks. A 501(c)3 non-profit organization, the WordPress Foundation will also pursue a charter to educate the public about WordPress and related open source software.

Matt Mullenweg, founder and lead developer of the Wordpress publishing platform, explains how the open source philosophy and "Golden Rule" apply not only to technology -- but to such fields as politics, economics and environment. Recorded at Wordcamp Montreal 2009 by Christian Aubry. Licence: Creative Commons BY-SA.

An in-depth interview with WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, where he talks about blogging, the popular Word Press platform, and much more.

Jason's guest is Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Wordpress

The triple bottom line (abbreviated as TBL or 3BL, and also known as people, planet, profit or the three pillars) captures an expanded spectrum[further explanation needed] of values and criteria for measuring organizational (and societal) success: economic, ecological, and social.

The triple bottom line is made up of "social, economic and environmental" the "people, planet, profit" phrase was coined by John Elkington in1995 while at SustainAbility, and was later adopted as the title of the Anglo-Dutch oil company Shell's first sustainability report in 1997. As a result, one country in which the 3P concept took deep root was The Netherlands.

"People, planet and profit" succinctly describes the triple bottom lines and the goal of sustainability.

In the private sector, a commitment to corporate social responsibility (CSR) implies a commitment to some form of TBL reporting. This is distinct from the more limited changes required to deal only with ecological issues.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR, also called corporate conscience, corporate citizenship, social performance, or sustainable responsible business/ Responsible Business) is a form of corporate self-regulation integrated into a business model. CSR policy functions as a built-in, self-regulating mechanism whereby a business monitors and ensures its active compliance with the spirit of the law, ethical standards, and international norms. The goal of CSR is to embrace responsibility for the company's actions and encourage a positive impact through its activities on the environment, consumers, employees, communities, stakeholders and all other members of the public sphere who may also be considered as stakeholders.

Sustainability is the capacity to endure. For humans, sustainability is the long-term maintenance of responsibility, which has environmental, economic, and social dimensions, and encompasses the concept of stewardship, the responsible management of resource use. In ecology, sustainability describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time, a necessary precondition for the well-being of humans and other organisms. Long-lived and healthy wetlands and forests are examples of sustainable biological systems.