WordCamp Melbourne Intro and Morning Presentations

Today I am at my first blogging event, WordCamp Melbourne. 

The morning started of with an introduction from Simon Chen from Eight Black.

James Farmer from Edublogs something, a local WordPress guru then introduced the first speaker, Alex Shiels from Automattic. 

Alex spoke first about various statistics of WordPress such as how much info transfer there is, how many users, how much spam. A lot of spam. Then went on to talk about their management process. He displays $250,000,000,000 and states it is the largest amount they have ever been sued over. He then goes on to talk more about management process including their load sharing systems and chasing systems. He then goes on to mention the troubles of timing associated with propagating changes though the caches in their various server farms. 

Questions

1. Q. Is there going to be a Themes competition like blogger did a while ago? A. There are some new themes in the pipeline and we are working on ideas of a theme marketplace.
2. Q. What is the relationship of WordPress.org? A. They are quite similar, Wordpress MU and WordPress.org are more similar to each other than with .com. Right now there is a few things that are not released because of secrecy but in general they are the same.
3. Q. WPMU, are there plans to create larger scale features? A. HyperDB has been released, Barry gave a talk about this a while back that should be online. I will talk to some people about that but for now there are only some implementations of ideas for this.
4. Q. Automattics opinion on the GPL? A. Each person working there would have a different opinion. I like the BSD license, others at the company really like the GPL. 
5. Q. The question really is, as a plug-in developer what licenses would you like people to use? A. We support people using GPL it is easy and it is efficient. 
6. Q. Are you changing the admin theme? A. There is work on that, it has been around for a while and it kind of sucks. We are more concerned with doing it right than doing it now. 

James came back to talk some more and do his own talk on his work with WPMU. He talks a little about his companies growth, a whole punch of blog sites... He clams he is not going to talks about, security, promotion, attention, support, communication, time or feedback. If you are going to compete you have to have something great to compete with. However, the market is NOT flooded. There is a huge opportunity to stay out of the social network market. A blog site has a major difference, it is close to you, a social network, on the other hand, is a place you go to do something... 

One has to decide, community or service. Community is about interaction and sharing, you will need a lot of plug-ins to help run the WPMU site as a community and enable community features. Service, is a thing you use, a tool. Most bloggers are not quite doing a community, but generating a service. Similarly there will be a lot of associated plug ins and customisations to help organise everything. 

Code. You really need some good code work if you are going to do a blog network because there are a lot of things like plug-ins that continually need to be messed with. Server topology is also very important and having a skilled person to deal with these issue is paramount to success. What you do not need is a graphic designer. We found out that it does not matter at all, in the end what mattered was that people could pretend that it was a community system. People want to feel part of a community, they may not interact, but they want the feeling. 

Money. This is really the question of why you are doing your work, is it for money? If it is, you really need to think about the model. We do this, we sell parts of our code as our main business model. Also, however you can actually do advertising, without being an asshole. This is quite rare but people like Wordpress.com do it quite well. Do it as an external link, ie search, click through. But, it does not have to be about the money, it can be about the passion. 

Questions:

1. Q. Can you talk more about the adds work? A. I don't really know that much but there are some good plug ins that do it, for instance only have adds for non friends, only have ads for people coming from a search engine, adds for non registered users. We do not do it as we are for education.
2. Q. If you were starting something new what would it be? A. Farmnet.com.au is an interesting, a pretty big network. He works with a great email list and he shares it on the grounds of a network. If you do not have that list, find someone who does. 
3. Q. How big a problem is SPAM? A. It is a pretty big problem, we check all posts. We also use capchas on sign up and we have a terms of service agreement system on sign up. I think it is not a bad idea to make people try hard to get a blog, to avoid too much spam. Akin to the idea or Barriers of Entry (some book).