“All the stuff that’s done really well on mobile has been incredibly short form and easily scannable,” Mullenweg told AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher. “I think there’s a space … to sit down and read something longer than a couple of seconds. Rather than the coffee line experience, what’s the sitting-down-in-the-back experience? We’re going to keep experimenting.”

Mullenweg said that the average post on WordPress is 280 words long, and that’s remained “relatively constant” over the past few years. “Certain ideas need to be expressed and they just need more than 140 characters,” he said.

WordPress is taking steps to surface more of its users’ content. “We’ve been working a lot on wordpress.com to create an interesting reading experience,” he said. The site’s “Freshly Pressed” feed surfaces content from across users’ blogs. “You’ll see a lot more longform content and a lot more galleries [on the feed],” Mullenweg said, and traffic to that feed has grown by double digits in the past couple of months.

When Swisher noted that WordPress doesn’t link its users’ blogs together — suggesting what else to read if you liked a certain post, say — Mullenweg answered that “we’re really excited about starting to do that.”

And while Mullenweg criticized many forms of digital advertising — “print ads are still infinitely better” — he suggested that WordPress might look at offering more native advertising options. WordPress would consider a partnership with a company offering native ad units, he said, if it’s “something really compelling that doesn’t make readers block it…Native advertising is the most interesting thing I’ve seen. At the point where advertising becomes as good as the content that surrounds it, I will applaud it.”

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

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• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Social Media in the Enterprise
• Is LinkedIn trying to become WordPress for the business executive set?

Last year we talked about how connectedness changes everything. We thought it would be a good idea for us to rewind and share some of the conversations from the 2011 event as we work on the 2012 edition.

Jack Dorsey, Square & Twitter

Tony Fadell, Nest

Drew Houston, Dropbox

Brian Chesky, AirBnB

Matt Mullenweg, Automattic/Wordpress

The complete archives from GigaOM RoadMap 2011.

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• Themes for a connected world: GigaOM RoadMap review
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

A couple of highlights from the interview:

Blogging has been declared dead at least five times. But that’s like saying creativity is dead, or personal expresion is dead. Ultimately some percentage of the people who get a taste for it through Facebook and Twitter want their own space. And for the most part, that’s a blog.

And from the avid photographer who goes by @photomatt in his social media life:

One of the things I’ve been working on for the past few months is a radical simplification of the interface. WordPress, it’s a complex tool, it’s like the back of a digital SLR … but that doesn’t work on a phone.

Here’s the full 20-minute video:

And here’s Mullenweg’s take.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

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• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Social Media in the Enterprise
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Speaking at the paidContent 2012 event on Wednesday, Mullenweg said that he had been hard at work coming up with a new interface that will eradicate some of the complexity that WordPress is usually associated with.

“One of the things I’ve been working on for the past few months is a radical simplification of the interface,” he told interviewer Anil Dash. “WordPress it’s a complex tool, it’s like the back of a digital SLR… but that doesn’t work on a phone.”

That complexity has become one of the reasons it is used by a wide range of different people, from tiny bloggers to The New York Times, and is now reported to be the system behind one in eight sites on the web. But Mullenweg admitted it would be tough to move the company in a completely new direction, given the scale and takeup that WordPress already has.

“We’re doing that, but at the same time we’ve got tens of millions of users who love the other thing,” he said. “WordPress is really on its third or fourth major pivot. It’s easy to pivot if things are going badly, but when it’s going well you have the weight of all your existing users.”

However, he dismissed the idea that the core business of blogging was something that had been undermined by the rise of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and other services.

“Blogging has been declared dead at least five times,” he said. “But that’s like saying creativity is dead, or personal expresion is dead. Ultimately some percentage of the people who get a taste for it through Facebook and Twitter want their own space. And for the most part, that’s a blog.”

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Check out the rest of our coverage of paidContent 2012. Full archived video on livestream (registration required).

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If your responsibility is to make money from content, what should you do next? If the answer was easy, we’d all be on vacation. It’s not — which is why several hundred execs in media, entertainment, information and technology will be at The TimesCenter in New York today for top-level discussion about what’s working, what hasn’t and what’s showing the most promise. We’re hosting a star-studded roster of digital media leaders, including News Corp.’s Jon Miller, Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne; Martha Stewart COO Lisa Gersh; WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg; new USA Today Publisher Larry Kramer; and Condé Nast’s Bob Sauerberg. We’ll talk about making video pay, true cross-platform publishing, discoverability and much more.

Can’t make it in person? Our staff will be writing about it here, you can follow the hashtag #pc2012 — and, even better, you can join us virtually via the livestream of paidContent 2012 here.

Live-blogged stories from the event:

• Content, not hardware, have made tablets the current king
• The new digital newsstand: Enabling “pass-along” — and saying no sometimes
• Digital story-telling and the rise of the new publishers
• Fred Wilson: Content owners, don’t fear the future
• New ‘radically simplified’ WordPress is on the way
• HTML5 is a newspaper’s best friend – even if it has a mobile app
• Conde Nast’s Sauerberg: Get busy innovating, or get busy dying
• Don’t think of it as content, think of it as information
• For discoverability, traditional tools still dominate
• Does social beat search, or does “peacocking” get in the way?
• Financial Times exec: iOS apps don’t work for publishers
• Jon Miller: Hulu still essential to broadcasters
• Social media doesn’t speed up the news cycle — it kills it
• Richard Russo: Amazon puts great young writers in “particular peril”
• Is a vast video library worth the time and money?
• Harry Potter’s publishing wand can tame Amazon, pirates

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• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies
• Forecast: the evolution of the e-book market
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

I’m also thinking about the range of interviews on tap, including two I’m doing. As president of Condé Nast, Bob Sauerberg is managing the translation of some of the magazine industry’s most iconic brands to a variety of devices and formats. In some cases, CN has tried to revive a brand by going pure digital, most famously with Gourmet Live. We’ll talk about what Sauerberg has learned, how committed CN is to app distribution, whether magazine consortium Next Issue Media can gain any meaningful traction and more.

Jon Miller is the chief digital officer of News Corp., the home of tablet tabloid pioneer The Daily, as revolutionary in its own way as USA Today was in 1982, and of a lot of digital experiments and acquisitions with mixed results (including MySpace, an acquisition Miller didn’t make but had to unwind after numerous rescue attempts failed). A current fixation for the former AOL CEO: video across properties, including the Wall Street Journal and IGN, not just the traditional sources of Fox networks and studios. And through it all, News Corp. has to protect its traditional billions and cope with the constant image hits in the UK. The same internet that offers so much potential revenue also makes it easy for every ripple to go tidal wave.

Other one-on-ones include:

• betaworks CEO John Borthwick with GigaOM Founder Om Malik
• VC Fred Wilson with Mathew Ingram, who outlined some ideas here
• Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo will talk with our legal writer Jeff Roberts about the challenges facing authors from copyright to consolidation to pricing
• Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne will talk to Laura Hazard Owen about taking a beloved brand digital
• Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg in conversation with Anil Dash about platforms, power and disruption.

And that’s just part of the day. Check out the complete schedule and the full list of confirmed speakers is here.

The remaining ickets are selling fast — so if you want to take full advantage of the opportunities that come with networking from breakfast to closing cocktails, I strongly suggest you register now.

Thanks to our sponsors for their support. If you’re interested in sponsoring paidContent 2012, please contact eventsales@gigaom.com.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock user [Joshua Haviv].

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• Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure
• Connected consumer third-quarter 2012
• Forecast: the evolution of the e-book market

Sure, newspaper revenues are tanking and layoffs are happening. And there’s no doubt that there is pain and chaos everywhere else in the industry. Radio, television and magazines — all are facing trying times. But as people say, amidst chaos lies opportunity. Over the past few years, we’ve seen mobile devices like smartphones and tablets explode and the emergence of e-paper, astonishing new screens, global distribution platforms, new payment systems such as Amazon and Apple’s stores, and social amplifiers like Facebook and Twitter. We are in the forest after a downpour, and we are ready for new ideas to mushroom.

I admit there are more questions than answers at this point, but these questions are the raw material we can use to write a better script for tomorrow’s content business. These threats and, more importantly, opportunities will be part of the discourse at paidContent 2012, which will be held on May 23, 2012, at the TimesCenter in New York City.

Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures

In conversations with industry leaders such as Bob Saureberg of Conde Nast, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures (an investor in revolutionary companies such as Kickstarter and Twitter) and Amy Banse of Comcast, conference chair and paidContent editor Staci Kramer — along with GigaOM senior writer Mathew Ingram — will ponder the future of the business. No surprise, Staci has labeled this conference: At the crossroads. Here is the schedule. (Click here to register.)

Other speakers at the event include Vivian Schiller of NBC News, Lisa Gersh of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Jon Miller of News Corp., John Borthwick of Betaworks, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress/Automattic and Anil Dash of Expert Labs. Read the full list of speakers here.

I am looking forward to this event and figuring out the future of the industry I love so much.

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• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• Report: Monetizing Digital Content
• Connected consumer third-quarter 2012

While 2011 was a very busy year for the technology industry, the constant rate of innovation and activity in the market shows that things probably won’t slow down in 2012. Below, we’ve rounded up some of GigaOM’s biggest stories of the year — roughly in the order that they occurred — with a bit of insight on what each could mean for 2012.

• AT&T’s $39 billion bid to buy T-Mobile
• Facebook makes its data center details public
• Google and Facebook battle for the social networking crown
• Netflix screws up — again and again
• Spotify launches in the US
• Google buys Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion
• Solyndra crashes and burns
• Hewlett-Packard’s soap opera
• Steve Jobs dies at age 56
• The tech IPO makes a big comeback

AT&T’s $39 billion bid to buy T-Mobile

Sunday mornings are usually pretty sleepy in terms of business news, but March 20th, 2011 was an exception. That’s when AT&T announced its plan to buy T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom AG for a whopping $39 billion. A deal that huge naturally catches the attention of everyone: The media, consumer groups, industry competitors, and perhaps most importantly, federal regulators. After nearly nine months of back-and-forth about the legality of the merger that came to be known as AT&T-Mo, the deal fell apart: On December 19, AT&T ended its bid to buy T-Mobile as its CEO Randall Stephenson pledged to “continue to be aggressive in leading the mobile Internet revolution.”

What this means for 2012: As GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham pointed out, despite the failure of AT&T-Mo, major changes in the wireless space are inevitable and consolidation will continue:

Now that the deal is off the table, the industry can return to solving the big question that plagues wireless in the U.S.: How the heck will operators get the spectrum and build the networks they need to support robust demand for 4G wireless services and still make money. … AT&T’s bid to get more spectrum wasn’t just an attempt to take out a competitor; it really did need more spectrum for its LTE network, and having T-Mobile’s AWS airwaves ready for an LTE deployment would have made AT&T’s migration path a lot simpler. As operators move from 3G to 4G services such as LTE, they are learning the costs associated with remaking and upgrading their networks are substantial. And as they look ahead to spectrum-hogging standards such as LTE-Advanced, they need more megahertz.

Facebook makes its data center details public

Facebook's Prineville, Oregon datacenter

Most big Internet companies spend a lot of time and money on designing and maintaining data centers. But typically, these companies keep the nitty-gritty details of how they manage the servers that power their operations to themselves — the makeup and quantity of servers that run Google has long been some of the search company’s most highly-guarded secrets, for example (though Google has been sharing that data as of late). Facebook, however, decided to start telling the world about its data center details.

In April 2011, the social networking company debuted the Open Compute Project, in which it provided full specifications of its computing infrastructure. The reason, Facebook says on its OpenCompute.org website, is to help improve technology as a whole:

“We want you to tell us where we didn’t get it right and suggest how we could improve. And opening the technology means the community will make advances that we wouldn’t have discovered if we had kept it secret.”

What this means for 2012: More sharing in the infrastructure space, particularly around how to reduce energy consumption of data centers. Executives from Intel, RackSpace, Arista Networks and Goldman Sachs all joined the Open Compute Project’s board of directors. Of course, pledging to be “open” is almost always good PR, but with this particular initiative Facebook is leading the way with concrete efforts for real transparency in a major industry issue.

Google and Facebook battle for the social networking crown

In June, Google launched Google+, its newest answer to the social networking space that in recent years has been dominated by Facebook. That move seemed to spark renewed vigor from Facebook to maintain its social edge and the next week at a quickly-assembled press event for a new in-Facebook video chat app powered by Skype, Mark Zuckerberg kicked off what he called his company’s “Launching Season 2011.” This season also seemingly culminated with the September debut of Timeline, a dramatically different new Facebook user interface. Google, meanwhile, directed increasing amounts of its attention on trying to make Google+ a success.

What this means for 2012: Even more competitive activity and expect the year to be cut throat. Facebook and Google are showing no signs of backing down from the battle, and with its own bold new redesign, Twitter has thrown its cap into the ring to be the social networking site of choice.

Netflix screws up — again and again

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings

What a year it’s been for Netflix — and not in a good way. It all began in June, when the company announced changes in its pricing structure (splitting its DVD rental business from its online streaming business) that would significantly boost prices for the vast majority of customers. Not surprisingly, that didn’t go over so well. So in September, CEO Reed Hastings apologized for the changes and took back the price hike. Instead, he said, Netflix’s DVD rental business would be rebranded as Quikster and essentially put up for sale as the Netflix brand moved to a streaming-only model. That didn’t go over so well, either. So less than a month later, Netflix once again backtracked, killing the Quikster proposal and electing to keep DVD rentals in its core business. Wall Street analysts lauded Netflix’s ultimate decision to keep DVD rentals alive, but Wall Street punished the company nevertheless: Netflix share price dropped from nearly $300 earlier this year to about $70 now.

What this means for 2012: Netflix has its work cut out for it, having closed out 2011 with its lowest customer satisfaction ratings in company history. GigaOM’s Ryan Lawler recently put it thusly:

“Netflix is still the clear leader in the online streaming space, with about 24 million subscribers. But for years Netflix has relied on the virtuous cycle of positive word-of-mouth to help propel its growth. With customer satisfaction declining rapidly, it’ll have to work harder to retain existing customers and to win new ones.”

Spotify launches in the US

Spotify, the popular Europe-based on-demand music streaming service, finally made its highly anticipated debut in the United States in mid-July. A couple months later, the service got an extra boost with a deep integration with Facebook that let users easily listen to songs on Spotify and share them with friends through the social networking service.

What this means for 2012: The buzz around Spotify seems to have spurred other online music services to bring their A-games to the space. Expect more innovation from Pandora, MOG, Rdio, Rhapsody and others.

Google buys Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion

Andy Rubin (Google) and Dr. Sanjay K. Jha (Motorola) onstage at Mobilize 2009

Google shook up the dog days of mid-August when it announced plans to acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. Once the deal is closed (it’s expected to go through in early 2012) Google will have bought access to Motorola’s portfolio of 17,000 current patents and 7,500 patent applications across wireless standards and non-essential patents on wireless service delivery.

What this means for 2012: The deal is such a huge one that all of its ramifications will take a while to become clear, but Google’s ultimate goal is to further strengthen the mobile strategy it built with the Android mobile operating system. With some 700,000 Android devices being activated daily, Google is already well-positioned in the mobile space — the Motorola investment shows that the company is in it for the long haul in mobile.

Solyndra crashes and burns

Solar panel maker Solyndra was one of the highest profile companies the cleantech space has seen in recent years, garnering visits from President Obama, and applause from Vice President Biden, DOE Secretary Steven Chu and then California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The company even received a $535 million loan from the U.S. government.

So when the company filed for bankruptcy in August 2011, laid off more than 1,000 employees, and essentially lost the entire tax-payer funded loan, it was a huge blow for a number of industries: Technology, venture capital, and of course solar power. Ucilia Wang wrote in-depth about the story behind Solyndra’s rise and fall for GigaOM.

The bigger trend behind Solyndra has been global crashing solar prices. Thanks partly to Chinese solar companies flooding the market with low (and below) cost solar panels, solar panel makers throughout the world have been struggling and have been going out of businesses. While that’s not good news for those firms, it’s great for consumers, businesses and utilities that are buying solar  panels — solar has never been cheaper.

What this means for 2012: Being that the Solyndra implosion will go down as one of the biggest venture capital losses in history, VC firms will be understandably hesitant to invest in solar companies for quite some time. Also, the federal grants awarded to Solyndra have become a punchline of sorts in the political arena, so the U.S. government may also shy away from supporting solar companies for a while.

Hewlett-Packard’s soap opera

In August, Hewlett-Packard raised eyebrows when it announced plans to spend $10 billion in cash to acquire Autonomy, a UK-based software and services company and said it would look into selling off its $40 billion-a-year PC business. Investors and the industry at large were stunned by both moves which, apparently, were the last straw for HP’s board as well. A month later, HP fired Leo Apotheker, the CEO who brokered the deal and set the PC change in motion, and brought in former Ebay CEO Meg Whitman as his replacement.

What this means for 2012: As GigaOM’s Barb Darrow writes, 2012 is a crucial time for HP to work to “repair its reputation and restore itself to the status of IT icon.” Whether the company will succeed in doing so remains to be seen.

Steve Jobs dies at age 56

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’ death on October 5 was a big story for the world even beyond the tech community. Although his passing was not completely unexpected — Jobs had suffered from pancreatic cancer and related complications for some time, and had stepped down from the CEO role at Apple in August because of his health — his death deeply affected many people. Jobs was hugely influential through his work at Apple and as a tech industry figure in general.

What this means for 2012: WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg recently told GigaOM that he thinks Jobs will affect tech in the months and years to come:

“Steve Jobs’ passing affected me more than I expected. I think we’re going to enter a golden age of design, just by virtue of thousands and thousands of founders and designers asking themselves, ‘What would Steve do?’ The things that these people will create will be even bigger than Apple. That’s part of his legacy.”

The web IPO makes a big comeback

A number of venture-backed web companies made their stock market debuts this year. LinkedIn (LNKD), Pandora Media, Zillow, Groupon, Zynga, and TripAdvisor- all went public in 2011. While not all of these companies had stellar post-IPO stock price performances, the very fact they got out the gate is a win in itself for investors and founders.

What this means for 2012: By the looks of it, the IPO wave is just getting started. Analysts say 2012 promises to be another big year for tech IPOs, and in the spring 2012 public offering expected from Facebook will likely be the star of the show.

Some images courtesy of HackingNetflix, whiteafrican, hyku, jdlasica, and Mathieu Thouvenin.

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• How the mega data center is changing the hardware and data center markets
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