Exclusive.

Gnip is now the first company authorized to resell firehose access to the public data from WordPress.com, the comment platform IntenseDebate, and WordPress.org sites that have opted into the Jetpack plugin. Gnip has had a relationship with WordPress for some time, but this partnership will give Gnip a 70-percent increase in its coverage of blog posts and comments through the popular WordPress service, which now powers more than 60 million blogs worldwide.

Twitter brings news, but WordPress has analysis

The Boulder, Colo.-based Gnip is probably best known as the first company authorized to resell access to Twitter’s data firehose back in November 2010, but Gnip currently provides access to some 30 different sources including Facebook, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Vimeo, and others. In fact, today Gnip works with hundreds of customers, such as Radian6, that are collectively serving social media data to over 90 percent of the Fortune 500.

Also, the difference between Twitter data and WordPress data is significant for businesses, Gnip President and COO Chris Moody said in a recent interview. “News breaks on Twitter, but you’re not getting deep sentiment analysis with the data there. That comes with blogs, like what WordPress powers,” he said. “Twitter’s a great initial signal but WordPress blogs give you better sentiment. Companies tracking what’s going on in social media need the full picture.”

The expansion of the WordPress deal is just the first in many new partnership deals Gnip has on deck for 2012, as the company fields more demand for social media content. “We’re effectively doubling down with WordPress and bringing some new data to the market,” Moody said. “Twitter opening up its firehose to us has really had a domino effect in the world of publishers, and now other publishers have noted that it’s important for businesses to have access to this data.”

Competition at the Twitter firehose

There’s another big reason it makes sense for Gnip to expand its other content sources: It has competition on the Twitter front. DataSift, the only other company authorized to provide access to Twitter firehose data, launched in the U.S. in Nov. 2011. Not surprisingly, though, Moody maintains Gnip has not been “paying attention” to DataSift’s growth, as it’s been “so focused on our own business.”

The thing is, that line is actually somewhat believable in Gnip’s case, as the booming demand for social media data is keeping the company quite busy. It now has 33 people, more than triple its size from just a year ago, Moody said. Meanwhile, the company has not taken on outside funding since Nov. 2010; its total VC investment is around $6.5 million.

One thing is certain: Better access to more data is good for both brands and the social media companies that host the conversations about them. It’ll be exciting to see what else Gnip and other companies in the space have on deck for the months ahead.

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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Evolution of social media by Elad Gill (graphic courtesy of Elad Gill)

Updated: The new hot social thing on the web these days is a Palo Alto, Calif.–based company started by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp. (I incorrectly described this group as ex-Facebookers. My apologies for the error.) It is called Pinterest and it is about the concept of curation — a much abused phrase in Silicon Valley. Essentially it allows you to create visual collections of things that you like and find on the web. It is especially popular with young women. Some smart folks such as serial entrepreneur Elad Gill have started talking about “social content curation” and point to the evolution of online content. They even have a graph to show it all. Gill writes on his blog:

2012 will likely see an acceleration of structured, push button, social curation across the web. Why? Because most users don’t want to take much effort to produce content, and consuming content in a structured manner (especially photos) is also much faster.  Just as the first wave of social media has transformed the consumption of information, this next wave of social curation will fundamentally change how users find and interact with content over time.

The way I see it, Pinterest is yet another example of basic human behavior’s being transposed on to the web. Long before the Internet, we had newsletters and diaries. We had real friends. We used to go meet them in person, write letters to them, check out movie theaters and go to dinner with them. We sent people birthday cards. Of course, then came the Internet and we had WordPress, Yelp, Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.

Back when I was young, my cousins would cut out photos, ads and visuals from fashion and lifestyle magazines and create collages. We boys would create collages of scantily clad girls, cars, musicians and sometimes movie stars. We would buy used magazines for a few pennies to get the right image. We would put the clippings together and then stick them on the bedroom walls and feel very cool, because being able to create an awesome, colorful collage showed a little something about you. Now we have Tumblr and Pinterest and dozens of other such services.

In 2005, David Galbraith, a friend of mine who has a nasty habit of predicting the future before everyone else, built a service called Wists. It was Pinterest, just six years too early. He was the guy who co-founded Moreover (with Nick Denton) to aggregate news, a trend that went mainstream thanks to the likes of Yahoo. He was also the guy who came up with the idea (and the name) for Yelp. And in 2005 he explained to me that the web will have to move away from being text-centric to become very visual and will revolve around the idea of collecting. See, being an architect, he isn’t nerdy enough to come up with a phrase: curate.

Well, since everyone is using “curate,” why don’t we? Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr — these are all services that are about a major societal trend called hyperpersonalization. We are living in a society that is so homogenized that it is hard to stand out.

From the foods we eat, the drinks we chug, the jeans we wear, the bags we buy, the shoes we run in — they are pretty universal. As a result, we all want to stand out in this massive mass of humanity. We do this in different ways. In tribal cultures, features, bones and colors help everyone stand out. In modern society we do this by wearing earrings, bracelets, buying a certain brand of clothes or living a certain lifestyle. Like being vegan! One of the most extreme form of standing out — tattoos — is a way of self-expression.

The online world is even worse: Everything looks so similar that we do need to do something to stand out. And you can do that by building a carefully curated image of yourself that you are trying to project onto the world. My colleague Ryan Kim says that Fab.com is doing something similar on its inspiration wall and is combining it with commerce.

I wrote about this in one of my earliest Om Says newsletters: “Now starring you, in a movie about you”:

Many of the photos I take are actually pretty mundane, but thanks to filters, they become magical. These tools add a certain mystique and drama to these photos and our lives, making them look more interesting, more like movies.

In our 21st-century society, we all want to stand out and get attention. Narcissistic? Perhaps, but we’re living in this century and defining the ethos for the new Internet-connected age as we go along.

What I can tell you is that the technology companies that benefit from these big trends are those who provide platforms for sharing our lives.

SixApart’s MoveableType, Flickr and Blogger were early proponents of sharing, but they never really got to realize their full potential because they grew up in an era limited by relatively low broadband penetration and lack of mobility-driven computing.

Subsequent platforms — YouTube, WordPress and Tumblr — have had more success, thanks to faster, cheaper broadband connections. Twitter and Facebook are the big winners of this sharing.

The emergence and growing popularity of San Francisco-based Instagr.am is yet another sign that in the end, this cultural shift benefits the platform providers.Next time you are thinking about building a product, evaluating a company or just wondering why early adopters are so crazy about Instagr.am or Quora, keep in mind we’re playing a role in a movie: edited, directed and starring us.

I am sure we are going to hear more about Pinterest and other curation-centric companies in the months to come. But before I go, I want to leave you with this photo by Tracy Martin, who has shared it on 500Px.com. Martin’s visual experiment perfectly sums up the idea of self-expression through curation and sharing online.

The turning of the clock to 2012 means a new beginning for many. I am happy with simply tweaking what has been working by making things simpler and thus better. So as I look ahead, I hope that over the next few months, some of the technology products that I use the most will make incremental changes that could make life better for the people who use their products.

Here is my wish list, not in any specific order:

1. Twitter Sync

Twitter is trying its very best to make its service more accessible to what some call “normals.” It’s a good aspiration to have. In the interim, what Twitter needs is the ability to “sync” across multiple devices and platforms.

How many times do I need to read the same direct message or @ reply? The fact of the matter is that syncing across platforms is table stakes in today’s modern and highly mobile web. If they have trouble developing this, maybe Amazon can license it to them.

2. Amazon Match

This holiday season, I signed up for iTunes Match  and now I have nearly all of my music in the iCloud. Now Amazon needs to build something similar — for lack of a better word, let’s call it Amazon Match. I’ve bought hundreds of books from the Seattle-based online retailing giant. What I want them to do is make all of them (or at least the ones available online as e-books) sync to my Kindle account.

If they want to charge me an annual fee, I’m perfectly fine with that. It’s one way of keeping me loyal to the Kindle platform and keeping me using it more often. Kindle as a front end for my cloud-based book library isn’t far-fetched: They’re making videos and music one acquires through Amazon available on Amazon Prime, so why not books?

3. Instagram-to-Blog

Instagram just might be the most used social app on my iPhone (after Twitter.) I love using it, because it allows me to cross-post photos to various platforms: Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Foursquare. However, there’s nothing I want more than for Instagram to build support for WordPress (and other blogging platforms such as Squarespace) so I can post my photos directly to my personal blog at the same time as I do on other services. It allows me to share my experiences with others who aren’t on Instagram and allows me to keep a permanent record of those experiences.

4. Connect the apps

In December 2011, Path relaunched, and with it, created a unified social and mobile experience. It combined photo sharing with location, video sharing and a whole lot of other little incremental changes that basically helped the Dave Morin project recover from its early blunders.

However, the biggest take away from Path is that we need ways for mobile apps to connect with each other better and create enhanced experiences across platforms. Right now, mobile users need to enter data (photos, locations, etc.) into different applications multiple times. The ability to mix and match the data from other apps is going to help us realize that “data is the new plastic.”

5. Un-Swiped

My iPad has become my preferred way of consuming information — video, text and photos — and has started to suck time away from my Macbook Air. This move to iPad has created many new reading experiences and some of them like the Flipboard and Zite  are quite spectacular. And then there are the OnSwipe-enabled WordPress.com blogs, which are a lot less so. It’s the one iPad-centric view that needs to be retired — or at the very least, it shouldn’t be the default setting for those blogs.

What is on your wishlist? Share with us.

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, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Stay nervous
Scott McNealy, Chairman, WayIn

Open Web FTW
Matt Mullenweg, Founder, WordPress/Automattic

Respect the physical world
Philip Rosedale, Co-Founder, Coffee & Power

Reinvent the display–again
Mary Lou Jepsen, Founder and CEO, Pixel Qi

Be the consumer-focused innovator
Dan Hesse, CEO, Sprint

Advocate for women in tech
Padmasree Warrior, CTO, Cisco

Be a better manager
Dennis Crowley, CEO, Foursquare

Make technology more human
Caterina Fake, Entrepreneur

Whip myself–and Path–into fighting shape
Dave Morin, Co-Founder and CEO, Path

Go everywhere and go deep
Travis Kalanick, Co-Founder and CEO, Uber

Lead the charge to electric transportation
Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla Motors, CEO SpaceX, Chairman SolarCity

Think big, take risks
Max Levchin, Serial entrepreneur

Images courtesy of Flickr user eschipul (Mary Lou Jepsen, CC-BY-SA), Mercedes McAndrew (Caterina Fake), Jefferson Graham (Dave Morin), Drew Altizer (Max Levchin, CC-BY), Brian Solis (Elon Musk, CC-BY www.briansolis.com and bub.blicio.us).

Go to page 2 (of 13) on GigaOM .

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We’ve been trying to help our customers answer the “which data” question for the last couple of years by providing anecdotal insights via examples we’ve seen across the industry. Although this approach has provided reasonable guidance, we’ve recognized for a while that there was an opportunity to take a more systematic, research-based approach to answering the question. This summer, we hired a Data Scientist to help us analyze and understand the data needs across various business use cases. The early results suggest that there are at least two key attributes that play a role in answering the “which data” question — reaction time and depth.

Reaction time

From the launch of the next gadget to the death of Osama Bin Laden, significant portions of social conversations are based around events. By analyzing social conversations around specific events, results quickly emerge illustrating that some social networks have faster reaction times to events than others.  For example, we looked at the social conversations happening around Netflix on October 25^th, which was the day after Netflix announced their most recent earnings.

As you would probably guess, Twitter reacted quickly to the news that Netflix opened down significantly. You can see from the chart that peak Twitter conversation happened within moments of the market opening and quickly trailed off.  Studying other conversational data sources such as WordPress it is clear that the overall reaction time was slower as compared to Twitter and the area of the conversation curve was much greater.  As you would expect, the reaction time for blog comments from WordPress significantly trailed the blogs themselves. It is interesting to note that peak Twitter activity corresponded to the opening bell where WordPress comments peaked well after the market closed.  I’m highlighting a very compressed event here, but we’ve studied enough events to see that these curves hold for slower developing events too such as political elections.

One other aspect of social sources as they relate to reaction times is whether an event was an expected event or an unexpected event.  The reaction time curves behave differently between a hurricane (expected natural disaster) and an earthquake (unexpected natural disaster), but I’ll have to save the details of this for a future blog post.

Depth

The amount of content that can be analyzed for insights across public social conversations varies significantly by source.  One of the key benefits of a source like Twitter is that the reaction times are fast which is great for business use cases requiring early signal detection.  However, the amount of content you can analyze for deeper insights on a single tweet payload itself is relatively concise.   On the flip side, sources like blogs, forums, and videos are more likely to be rich in opinion, sentiment, and engagement. In our Netflix example, Tweets such as “NFLX gaps down 35% on open!” tell you what happened, while blog posts like “How Netflix Lost 800,000 Members, and Good Will” have the deeper analysis to tell you why something happened.  Measuring depth is non-trivial, but there are lots of ways to get a feel for the depth of a network.  For example, one simple way to get a reasonable level of accuracy is to just look at the byte size of the various social activities.  Another way to gauge depth is to look at the area under the reaction time curve.  The bigger the area, the more likely you are to get a wide range of views and perspectives.

Mixing the perfect social cocktail

Which public social data is best for performing business analysis and decision-making?  The answer: it depends upon the business use case.

PR crisis management is typically very dependent on ultra fast reaction times so a source like Twitter can be great for early signal detection of a potential problem.  The same company might also be analyzing different public social conversations to inform their product development roadmap.   Millisecond reaction time for product development use cases isn’t typically a necessity.  In fact, a company may prefer in-depth analysis of historical conversation data over realtime conversations in order to make decisions about future products.  A far more important component for product development is the insight that can be gained from analyzing deep social conversations, opinions, etc.  One thing is clear from our early exploration; very few business use cases can be served completely by a single source of public social data.

Lots more work to do

This is just the beginning.  We are continuing to explore the role of different social data sources across different use cases.  Reaction time and depth are two important components, but we also recognize there are plenty of other variables to consider.  As we discover more we will continue to share our findings.  Our goal is to help businesses understand the appropriate social cocktail for the use cases they need to support.  Stay tuned …

Chris Moody is the President and COO at Gnip, a realtime social media data delivery company. He serves on the National Technical Advisory Board of Year Up, is an advisor to several technology startups, and is an active TechStars mentor.

Disclosure: 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.

Image courtesy of Flickr user aoife mac.

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His post made me ask myself: how long has it been since I have been blogging? Not an easy answer. I have had a website for a long time — mostly as a repository for articles I wrote for Forbes.com, Red Herring and a bunch of other publications. It had my resume as well. In the heyday of the dot.com bubble, I started writing an email newsletter (dubbed dotcomwala) and saved the archives on my website. There wasn’t much to do on the site. I ended up using Blogger, but mostly as a way to manage the site more easily — well, easier compared to Homesite & Dreamweaver, two tools I used for managing my website.

Along the way I became a reader first of Dave Winer and then Doc Searls. Their engaging and pithy, rapidly-updated style of linking and writing was so seductive that I started mucking about with Dave’s blogging platform(s.) I was trying out Dave’s Userland software long before it all made any sense to me. In September 2001, Dave blogged about the tragedy that changed our world. It was pretty clear that Winer had laid out what was going to be the future of media — and it still is.

Today we differentiate between blogging on blogging platforms and sharing on social platforms, but that is just semantics. The essence of blogging is not defined by a platform but by what I learned from Dave and his blogging platform — that media now is raw, collaborative and instantaneous.

And this is how it began

Over the holiday break in 2001, having just moved back to New York from San Francisco, I spent an inordinate amount of time on the Internet looking for new things and new ideas. The dot.com bust and the end of telecom bubble had made me think about writing a book. And I, eventually did. However, during those hours spent on the Internet, I ended up encountering MoveableType. An email later, Ben Trott (one half of the SixApart founding team with his wife Mena Trott) helped me set up a Moveabletype blog and suddenly we were off to the races. (Related: How Ev, Dave, The Trotts and Matt Mullenweg changed my life.)

Initial posts were still some of my articles from the Red Herring, but eventually I summoned up the strength to emulate my blogging heroes. I wrote and wrote and I guess I am still writing. In the process I became less interested in the rote work of a magazine — I was addicted to the blog and the daily interactions. I wrote every day and every day traffic went up. More importantly, more people joined the community of readers. My blog became a collaborative whiteboard /sounding board for my book, Broadbandits, which I had just begun writing.

Being addictive in nature, I was quickly hooked. The idea that all these smart people were sharing all their insights with me was the greatest feedback loop of all time. With every blog post, I engaged and learned. Ten years later, that learning continues. Not a day goes by that doesn’t see one of our readers leave a comment that makes me re-evaluate how I look at the technology or a topic I just wrote about.

I shared my opinions, I linked to stories I liked and more importantly, I used the blog to write/break news. My editors — Jason Pontin, Blaise Zerega and Josh Quittner — didn’t mind because I worked for monthly magazines and all of them knew that I was a “news” guy pretending to be working for a magazine. When I was working for Forbes.com during the early days of the dot-com bubble, I learned a vital lesson – you had to write every day to be any good and to have a complete handle on the beat. There was no way around the plain-old beat the pavement reporting.

Somewhere along the way the allure of blogging became such that I had to go tell my boss, Josh, that it was time for me to go and embrace my destiny. I loved Business 2.0 more than I loved anything, but  I overstayed by almost 18 months before I could pull the trigger. Ironically it was a late night drunken conversation with Matt Mullenweg, Mathew Ingram & Paul Kedrosky in Toronto (where I was a speaker at the debut Mesh conference) that did the trick.

In 2004, Anil Dash, also an early blogger (and inspiration) had introduced me to Toni Schneider (now CEO of Automattic) who had then sold a company to Yahoo. I wanted to talk to him because I had seen that we were going to enter a “lean startup” phase where the model was to build a product and exit by selling out to larger companies who needed some quick tuck-in products to complete their line-up. That one conversation led me to the other Tony (Conrad) and the story, The New Road to Riches.

Photo courtesy of Laughing Squid/Scott Beale.

So when it came time to leave, I went and chatted with Toni and Tony who led me to the newly formed True Ventures. A small seed round later, we were off to the races, trying to turn what essentially began life as brochure for my writings into a startup and eventually into a business.

As Josh would quip, I ate my own dog food. Life changed, forever, with that one act. And I am better for it. I have gone from being a lone writer to being part of a team. I am still learning the social skills that go along with being a founder. But that is a story for another day.

3 Posts a Day Keeps The Writer’s Block Away

Given that there isn’t quite an exact birthday (though December 13 is when I opened moveable type-powered GigaOm.com to the Internet) I thought this long break is a good time for me to sit and take stock. Here is the report card for past 10 years (not including the posts from my personal blog :)

• 11,165 posts
• About 3 posts a day, every day for roughly 10 years.
• About 2.06 million words.
• About 215 words per post.

Analyzing the data further helped me get these additional insights. For instance:

• In 2002, my first real and full year of blogging I wrote 187 posts and 35,105 words. By 2005, the total number of posts was up to 2,685 posts and 429,595 words. In 2010, the total number of posts had gone done to 283 and the total number of words slumped to 109,794. Average words went from 199 per post to 160 to 388 words/post.
• 2011 has been much slower – 136 posts at 465 words per post and a total of 63,223 words,  year to date.) I think majority of my writing for 2011 has been focused on big picture stuff including my occasional newsletter, Om Says.
• My top three most productive months are November, December and August — I guess I like writing during the holidays as it gives me more time to think and write.
• November 2004 was the most productive month of my blogging life – 339 posts followed by December 2004 when I wrote 283 blog posts.

Who’s afraid of Twitter? Not Bloggers

The second half of my blogging decade was marked by the rise of Twitter and other social medium. However, Twitter was (and still remains) the most active social sharing platform for me. I wondered if I my Twitter habit was costing me some blog posts. So I looked at my Twitter stats.

• 22,596 tweets over 1958 days or roughly 11.4 tweets a day.
• Assuming each tweet was about 10 words a day, that was still about 110+ words every day in tweets, though in reality actual words being spent on “tweets” were far fewer since many of my tweets are simple transmissions about my photos or blog posts.
• According to Tweetstats, I average roughly 510 tweets per month, with a preference for tweeting at 7 am (PST), especially on Wednesday, my heaviest tweet day.

So from the looks of it, Twitter has only acted as an accelerator for my blogging role, allowing me the luxury of writing less but reaching far more people. If the first five years were of extreme frenzy, then the second half is reflective of changes that happened not only in my work life but also in my personal life.

• As the data shows, my starting the company and taking on the founder duties acted as a speed bump and slowed down my blogging pace.
• Starting in 2008, I started to cut back on my daily work load and focus on my health. So far so good. Since 2010, thanks to GigaOM team, things have become more manageable for me.

What does the future hold? 

It is a good question. I have actually been thinking a lot about that lately and wondering how to reinvent the art form that I embraced over a decade ago. I don’t really have an answer, except that it is somewhere in the past and in the reasons why I fell in love with blogging.

It is pretty evident to me that chasing faux-stories that are cloaked as scoops or exclusives are of little or no interest to me. Sure, there will be a story or two like Microsoft buying Skype that will help make the old reporter in me ready to work around the clock, but in reality what does interest me is the “big picture” stuff. And if I can do it with more rigor and regularity, I would be happier (and better) for it.

One of the most pleasant (and surprising) developments of 2011 was me starting to write, Om Says: What To Read This Weekend. I started it mostly because I felt that we are continuously being bombarded with short, near term news and in the process failing to think about the big picture. I thought to myself hat our business has to be about more than just a feature upgrade or funding, or some new app.

At the same time, thanks to two awesome apps — Instapaper and Evernote — I was saving articles I would find and read during the week, often as triggers for further ruminations. I decided to share the best of seven from what I had read during the week, and the response has been pretty phenomenal. Why? Mostly because curation and sharing of content has become as important as writing. By sharing videos, photos, links, or quotes we are all essentially editors and the sharing itself is an act of editorializing. It was as Dave (Winer) showed during the dark days of September 2001.

Ironically, it was a lesson that I forgot. In late 2006 I started writing a link blog, The Daily Om, but stopped doing it mostly because a yoga-oriented journal objected to it and I didn’t feel like working on it. Lately, I have started culling interesting videos, quotes and news snippets on my personal blog. I have found it invigorating and will continue to experiment with new ideas.

Here are my 10 lessons learned:

1. Blogging is communal: In 2008, I wrote that “blogging is not just an act of publishing but also a communal activity. It is more than leaving comments; it is about creating connections.” That is the single biggest lesson learned of these past 10 years. Every connection has lead to a new idea, new thought and a new opportunity.
2. Being authentic in your thoughts and voice is the only way to survive the test of time.
3. Being wrong is as important as being right. What’s more important — when wrong, admit that you are wrong and listen to those who are/were right.
4. Be regular. And show up to blog every day. After all you are as fresh as your last blog post.
5. Treat others as you expect yourself to be treated.
6. (In 2006 I wrote this and it is worth repeating) Doc Searls once told me, and it has been one of the guiding principles for me: blog if you have something to say and respect your reader’s time. If you respect their time, they are going to give you some time of their day.
7.  A long time ago, Slate’s Farhaad Manjoo asked mefor some tips on blogging and here is what I told him – Wait at least 15 minutes before publishing something you’ve written—this will give you enough distance to edit yourself dispassionately.
8. Write everything as if your mom is reading your work, a good way to maintain civility and keep your work comprehensible.
9. Blogging is not about opinion but it is about viewing the world in a certain way and sharing it with others how you look at things.

The tenth lesson comes from Kevin Kelleher when he was writing for us back in 2010. In his post, How the Internet changed writing he noted:

Many bloggers tailor headlines and posts so that they’ll surface at the top of search results, making them at once easier to find and less enjoyable to read. And this decade, a lot of other bloggers mistook a strong writing voice for caustic irreverence. But most eventually learned that writing with snark is like cooking with salt — a little goes a long way.

If anything, avoiding that trap Kevin mentioned is the biggest lesson of them all.

Disclosure: Automattic 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, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True Ventures.

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Millions of people use the software that Matt Mullenweg helped to create, but very few of them would probably know his name. He is the baby-faced founder of WordPress — the open-source software that powers more than 50 million blogs, including some published by leading news websites such as the New York Times — and Automattic Inc., the for-profit spinoff from WordPress. Mullenweg, who was named one of the top 25 most influential people on the web by BusinessWeek, is a keynote speaker at our GigaOM RoadMap conference on Nov. 10 in San Francisco.

WordPress was created in 2003 when Mullenweg, who was then only nineteen years old and a freshman at the University of Houston, started modifying a popular blogging tool called b2 to make it easier to use. He was joined by several other programmers and WordPress was born — and from the beginning, Mullenweg says that he was firmly committed to making the software open source, because he himself had benefited from using so many open source tools as a programmer. WordPress got a huge boost in 2004 when another blog-software maker, Moveable Type, announced a pricing change that drove a lot of its users to WordPress, and it continued to grow strongly.

In 2006, Mullenweg founded Automattic (please see disclosure below), a for-profit company that was designed to sell services related to WordPress, which remained free for anyone to use and modify. So WordPress grew on two parallel tracks: the free and open-source software was available to anyone through WordPress.org — and at the same time, paid hosting and other services were available for a fee to individuals and corporate clients such as CNN and the New York Times through WordPress.com. Earlier this year, WordPress announced that more than 50 million blogs now use its software.

Managing an open-source community and a profitable startup at the same time has not been an easy task, but Mullenweg says he believes that the principle of open source is an important one, and that more companies should think about what they are giving back to the web and information technology community. To hear more of Matt Mullenweg’s thoughts on this topic, please join us at RoadMap, which you can find out more about at the conference website — tickets are available through EventBrite.

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.

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• Updated: Forecast: global mobile subscribers, 2010–2015
• Beyond social: the crowd-based enterprise

Why does asking GigaOM’s readership make sense? Because, as we suspected, they’re radically early adopters, as the 69 percent of respondents that said they’ve tried Google+ shows.

Source: GigaOM Pro

We asked this early adopter audience what kind of impact they expected Google+ to have on the competition. What did they think? As shown in the chart above, survey respondents think Google+ will have the biggest impact on Facebook and Skype, while companies like Twitter and LinkedIn won’t feel as much heat.

Why Facebook and Skype?

A few select quotes from the survey’s open-ended responses (the best of which are in the research note)* may give you a clue.

On Facebook

“Google+ has the potential to be a Facebook without the ‘my life is better/worse than yours’ component. Instead, it can shift the focus from digitally stalking your ‘friends’ to making authentic human connections how and with whom you choose.”

On Skype

“Google+ makes video chat an obvious choice rather than a secondary offering just to remain competitive. Initiating a hangout is intuitive. Combined with Circles, Google+ can be a place to share information with friends, family, and coworkers — even as a place to get work done — that moves the ‘social network’ idea to the next logical place.”

That’s not to say that Google won’t have to work hard to compete in the social media space, and the company’s past flops in this area only underscore that fact. For more on Google+’s competitive outlook, and to see more of the survey results, read the full research note at GigaOM Pro.

*To protect the identities of the respondents, we have not included names with any of the quotes.

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, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Blogging is on the decline, according to a New York Times story published this weekend — citing research from the Pew Center’s Internet and American Life Project — and it is declining particularly among young people, who are using social networks such as Facebook instead. Pretty straightforward, right? Except that the actual story said something quite different: even according to the figures used by the New York Times itself, blogging activity is actually increasing, not decreasing. And as the story points out, plenty of young people are still blogging via the Tumblr platform, even though they may not think of it as “blogging.” What blogging is really doing is evolving.

The NYT story notes that blogging among those aged 12 to 17 fell by half between 2006 and 2009 according to the Pew report, but among 18 to 33-year-olds it only dropped by two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier — which isn’t exactly a huge decline. And among 34 to 45-year-olds, blogging activity rose by six percentage points. The story also admits that the Blogger platform, which is owned by Google, had fewer unique visitors in the U.S. in December than it had a year earlier (a 2-percent decline), but globally its traffic climbed by 9 percent to 323 million.

In many ways, this “blogging is dying” theory is similar s to the “web is dead” argument that Wired magazine tried to float last year, which really was about the web evolving and expanding into different areas. It’s true that Facebook and Twitter have led many away from blogging because they are so fast and easy to use, but they have also both helped to reinforce blogging in many ways.

What’s really happening, as Toni Schneider of Automattic — the corporate parent of the WordPress publishing platform (see disclosure below) — noted in the NYT piece, is that what blogging represented even four or five years ago has evolved into much more of a continuum of publishing. People post content on their blogs, or their “Tumblrs,” and then share links to it via Twitter and Facebook; or they may post thoughts via social networks and then collect those thoughts into a longer post on a blog. Blog networks such as The Huffington Post get a lot of attention, but plenty of individuals are still making use of the longer-form publishing abilities that blogs allow.

One of the reasons why Tumblr seems to have taken off, particularly with younger users, is that it is extremely easy to set up and use — but it also offers many of the same real-time sharing options that have become popular with Twitter and Facebook. For example, Tumblr makes it easy for users to follow others and see their content in a “dashboard,” and then with a simple click they can “re-blog” another user’s post, which redistributes it to all their followers in much the same way that a “retweet” does on Twitter.

So what we really have now is a multitude of platforms: there are the “micro-blogging” ones like Twitter, then there are those that allow for more interaction or multimedia content like Facebook, and both of those in turn can enhance existing blogging tools like WordPress and Blogger. And then there is Tumblr, which is like a combination of multiple formats. The fact that there are so many different choices means there is even more opportunity for people to find a publishing method they like. So while “blogging” may be on the decline, personal publishing has arguably never been healthier.

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.

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Post and thumbnail courtesy of Flickr user Beverly

Updated: Squarespace, a hosted content service that competes with companies such as WordPress (see disclosure below) has closed a $38-million financing round from two leading technology VCs — Accel Partners and Index Ventures — that will give the seven-year-old company a significant warchest and some substantial backing in the battle for digital-publishing market share. Representatives from both venture funds will join Squarespace’s newly created board of directors, along with Jonathan Klein, the founder and CEO of Getty Images.

This is the first financing round for Squarespace, which has mostly flown under the radar compared with some of its more high-profile competitors. The company was started in 2003 by Anthony Casalena, who was 21 at the time (blog software seems to attract youth: WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg was 19 when he started the company) and has been self-funded until now.

One reason Squarespace doesn’t get as much attention as some of the other blog-hosting and content services could be that it doesn’t offer a free version — the company’s publishing packages, which include hosting and a variety of themes and other services, start at $8 a month and go as high as $50 — and because its user base is made up primarily of companies (including communications firm Porter Novelli and ABC News) and professional entities rather than individual bloggers.

Over the past four or five years, blogging — once the purview of the so-called “pyjama-clad” rogue writer — has become undeniably mainstream. Blog networks compete with traditional newspapers and magazines in a number of content areas including technology, and some — including Sugar Inc., Gawker Media and AOL’s Weblogs Inc — have become major publishing entities in their own right.

Perhaps the best example is the rise of The Huffington Post, which has brought attention not just to blogging but to the idea that a major media entity can be published using the same tools that bloggers use (the site is based on Moveable Type from Six Apart), and that blog software can be a competitor for the expensive and time-consuming content-management systems that are used by many traditional media outlets — some of which use WordPress and other tools to publish their blogs, but few of which have moved to using such tools for their entire websites.

The size of the investment that Squarespace has managed to attract from Accel and Index indicates that these investors see the potential to take the company’s software and services beyond simple blogging and into the broader world of content-management systems. Although some media companies have been experimenting with open-source software such as Drupal and Joomla for web publishing, both of these are fairly complex to manage, and a hosted solution could appeal to publishers such as the Telegraph Group, which is already using a number of cloud-based services.

In addition to WordPress — which raised $29.5 million in 2008 from a range of investors including the New York Times — one of the other big players in the online content-management market is Six Apart, which along with Blogger (founded by Twitter’s Evan Williams and later acquired by Google) was one of the early companies into the blogging race. Six Apart has several platforms such as Moveable Type, TypePad and Vox, and is focused primarily on appealing to corporate clients such as the Major League Baseball Association (the Washington Post and The Economist also use the company’s software).

Update: WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg responded to Squarespace’s funding news on his personal blog, saying the company “has come after our VIP program before, when they made a screencast showing how they could recreate Scoble’s blog in 15 minutes using their design tool.” Mullenweg added that the financing was “quite a chunk of change, so it will be interesting to see what they apply it to.”

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.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): What We Can Learn From the Guardian’s Open Platform

In another groundbreaking move, The Guardian newspaper in Britain has launched a plugin for the popular blog-publishing tool WordPress (see disclosure below) that allows web sites to embed the full text of Guardian news stories and other content for free. The plugin comes with a catch though: Sites also have to embed the newspaper’s advertising. The new tool is part of an ambitious program of opening the paper up to the web — a move that got its start in May of this year when The Guardian launched its “open platform,” which allows developers to use the publisher’s open API to create apps and services that include the newspaper’s content.

Matt McAlister, lead developer at The Guardian and the architect of both the open platform project and the open API, says the rationale behind both the open platform and the WordPress plugin is the same: to allow other sites and services to make use of the newspaper’s content, and at the same time to enlist them as partners in monetizing that content by carrying advertising (The Guardian also has platform partners who share the revenue from their services with the newspaper). The paper has had thousands of developers sign up to implement the open API.

At a time when newspapers like The Times of London and the Sunday Times are implementing paywalls — both papers erected them yesterday — and other newspaper, such as the New York Times, are working on their own pay restrictions, The Guardian’s move toward creating an open platform is unusual. But despite the newspaper’s losses, Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger has said that an open strategy is the key to the newspaper’s future.

The big unanswered question is whether any web sites — or enough to make it worthwhile — will actually want to implement either The Guardian’s open API or the new WordPress plugin. Since the newspaper already provides an RSS feed of its full content, some sites may simply decide to use that instead of carrying the paper’s advertising. It’s also not clear whether embedding another publisher’s news stories is something that a lot of sites or publishers want to do: Silicon Alley Insider, run by former stock analyst Henry Blodget, has had an “embed this post” feature for some time, but such posts are rarely seen on other sites (Blodget said the feature gets “solid use” but didn’t provide any numbers).

So why not just use The Guardian’s full-text RSS feeds? McAlister said in an email that since the feeds are designed for personal use, the paper would handle sites republishing it the same way they do “scrapers” — that is, “request they use our API. Then chase them legally if we have no other choice.” The plugin makes it easier for sites to use Guardian content, he said, because it doesn’t require anyone to implement an API. And it allows the paper to develop a relationship with bloggers such as Tim Kevan, who blogs at BabyBarista.com. Kevan severed his relationship with The Times when it announced it was putting up a paywall, and will now publish at The Guardian and use the WordPress plugin to post it to his own blog simultaneously.

One could even see an open blog network evolving, in which bloggers publish through The Guardian as well as on their own blogs, and then both sides share revenue from the advertising sold around that content. Regardless of whether The Guardian’s platform and plugin turn out to be a runaway success or not, however, it is refreshing to see a newspaper opening up to the web rather than trying to shut it out. In the video embedded below, Chris Thorpe — then the Guardian’s developer advocate — talks about the open platform and the rationale behind it:

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress, 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.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): What We Can Learn From the Guardian’s Open Platform

In recent years, my media consumption has gone up drastically, thanks to the iPhone. Now, whenever I get a chance, I fire up my Newsgator app and start checking out some of my favorite blogs and news sites. However, one thing the iPhone has not been able to do is become a convenient way to create content.

Sure, I have posted full-length blog posts from my BlackBerry; I even covered the launch of the iPad (ironically) with the new BlackBerry Bold from T-Mobile. But I wouldn’t recommend it, and given the state of my tendinitis, I don’t really want to :-)

When I have to write, I need to carve out some time, remove all means of mass distraction — Twitter, Facebook, email and Skype — think and then write. I usually refer to the notes I scribble down in my Moleskine notebook, which I carry around with me everywhere. I have a battered old Montblanc and for me that represents the most organic form of creativity.

However, between the time I jot down notes and thoughts and the time I actually end up turning them into articles and blog post, something gets lost. A thought misplaced, a cue lost or simply passion about something — I never quite get around to capturing the moment.

This morning, I woke up with a deluge of press releases about the iPad — many of them simply fantastic applications, such as the Netflix app — but there was one email which caught my eye. It was from my friend Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic and creator of WordPress, the blogging tool we use to publish GigaOM. (See disclosure at the bottom.) I have been haranguing him for the past few months about doing more on mobile devices. As if to shut me up, the WordPress team today announced its iPad app.

The screenshots made me wonder if somehow the iPad would help me overcome the shortcomings of the iPhone. In one of my earlier posts about the device Steve Jobs calls “magical,” I had pointed out that the iPad would enable anywhere computing. It would change the very idea of working on a computer altogether. Just like cell phones have made the idea of making calls from a fixed location almost seem ridiculous, iPad could do precisely the same for computing.

The increase in the number of persistent distractions now force me to use pen and paper to actually craft some of my longer posts — a pleasurable activity mostly because it forces me to be economical in thought and secondly, when I finally put the piece into WordPress, I end up doing some (Carolyn, our managing editor, would say much-needed) self-editing, which almost always makes the post better than originally drafted.

In many ways, the iPad’s lack of multitasking ability makes it worthy of focusing on just the task at hand. In my brief usage of the device at the time of its unveiling, I felt a near-complete interaction with an email or a document or a web page. That was near nirvana when it came to consumption of content.

The new WordPress app now makes me wonder whether blogging on the iPad could make it yet another powerful (yet simple) tool for content creation. Sure, there are some shortcomings — I’m not quite sure how to upload photos or videos to our blog, or how I actually get them onto the iPad without a computer without jumping through a few hoops. It’s still not clear how effective one can be when typing for long lengths of time on a touchscreen. One thing I do know: I won’t have an excuse to not blog about something just because I didn’t have a laptop handy.

I guess I will find out in a few days — and so will you.

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, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Automattic founder and frontman Matt Mullenweg explained in a blog post after the sites came back up that the company’s 10.2 million hosted blogs were down for 110 minutes, for a projected page view loss of 5.5 million. He attributed the downtime, Automattic’s worst in four years, to “an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers.” Mullenweg said the problem “broke all the mechanisms for failover between our locations in San Antonio and Chicago.” He assured users that all their data was safe and promised a “concrete plan” to better handle such situations in the future.

WordPress being down was only the latest of an outbreak of outages this week affecting us or companies we work closely with — given pretty much all of Palo Alto had no power yesterday after a plane crash and then our office Internet and phones (we are based in San Francisco) went out yesterday. It seemed almost fitting (but nonetheless frustrating) when our sites went down. We joked that it was due to rogue reporters’ illicit use of Chrome for Mac, which doesn’t seem to get along with WordPress.com, so we’ve been kindly reminded not to use it over and over again by our lead developer. (Sorry Chancey!) All you cloud haters out there can feel free to voice in about how dumb we are for trusting a hosted service.

All joking aside, I found it surprising that Automattic users — the majority of whom use its services for free — seemed to be fairly forgiving in the comments to Mullenweg’s apology post. It seems the company has enough goodwill to spare a couple hours of failure. But one thing’s for sure, people won’t be so friendly if it happens again.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): The 5 Biggest Cloud-Computing Stories of 2009

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, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Inspired by the thinking behind Dave Winer’s concept of “river of news,” it is a reflection of the changing nature of news in our time-constrained life. Many of our readers and sources have lamented that they have to read the full story when the real information can be wrapped up in two lines. At the same time, I was finding that my growing network on Twitter was feeding me more interesting stories to read than I could find myself.

So why not combine the two and come up with a live microblog-based newswire? Bloomberg, Reuters and Dow Jones have been using headline and news alerts forever. Except now we can do this on the Internet, using an open source platform (WordPress) and some clever hackery. (More details, along with notes about current and future features, below the fold.)

A Quick Rundown of Features:

1. It will feature 15 to 30 short posts every day. Each post will be less than 250 characters. Headlines are restricted to 115 characters.
2. You can receive the alerts by subscribing to RSS or on Twitter. Or, just sign up for once-a-day e-mail newsletter.
3. We’ll post topical headlines from GigaOM network and partner sites.
4. GigaOM Network editors and writers will file quick news bits relevant to their beats, including breaking stories and hot tips we pick up while on the go.
5. We can use Twitter to file news “from the field” using our Blackberries and/or iPhones. We have worked out a way to interface Twitter with our CMS, WordPress. (Related post, Meet GigaLogue.)

Open To Other Blogs, Too

We are going to use our network to build up this new service, but if you want to participate, it is as simple as getting in touch with us. We are in the process of working with some other blogs who will be feeding their news headlines and short excerpts into our system.

Over a period of time, we are going to open this to more folks and eventually have correspondents from around the world send in their “alerts” to us. But that is in the future. For now we just to make sure it works smoothly.

Other Planned Features:

1. Photos directly from our cell phones or digital camera when we are on the go.
2. On-the-go video clips to this service as well, again mostly from mobile phones or handhelds.
3. IPhone/Mobile Browser version of the site.
4. Special widget that you can embed on your blog.
5. Social networking widgets that will allow you to enjoy this in Facebook or on one of the many social networks and a desktop application based on Adobe Air. (If you want to help us on this, get in touch with me.)
6. More undisclosed features…Stay tuned.

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