Charl Norman

Coverage of Wordcamp 2008 can be found here on Zoopy and here on Twitter. Talking schedule here.

I’ve just arrived at Wordcamp South Africa 2008. The place is buzzing - everything seems to be setup well - Tyler Reed just did his intro speech and the Rockstar himself, Adii, is on taking about this premium Wordpress themes business.

09:45AM

Adii just introduced himself and elaborated on how he got started with his career (I even got a name drop in there).

The difference between free themes and his paid themes is good support and feature rich back ends to easily manage your Wordpress install. Adii and his partners plan to release up to two themes per month for their paying customers (themes club). They plan to engage talented Wordpess engineers to create themes under the Woo Themes banner. Releasing free themes and code snippets is also on the cards within the next few weeks. Adii shares that if it wasn’t for Wordpress he would likely be at a corporate desk (he has a degree).

Internet down

We back Skyrove New York hot spot

Vincent Maher was on earlier and noted that their leader network of blogs has millions of rands worth of content already.

11:20AM

Justin Hartman is on now showing off some of the stuff they did around Wordpress at Avusa (iLab). Open source tech allows them to roll out new products quicker and R&D costs are down.

Wordpress powers a multimedia portal by Avusa which they use to upload trailers and other media.

Wordpress is out of the box SEO‘d - this has helped generate organic traffic for Avusa.

Image credit

11:58AM

Matt, Wordpress creator is on - “Is there any Wordpress users here today?” We all laugh..

“Im glad to be here in San Fran.. oh.. doh! .. Its been a long flight!” - Matt mixes us up with San Fran (we wish)!

Wordpress.com had over 700k visits from South Africa in the last month. Wordpress went from 2.6 million downloads in 2007 to 11 mil + in 2008. 6 billion posts, 11 billion pageviews… 2.8 mil wordpress.org blogs to date - 3.8 mil client installs - so 6.7 mil Wordpress blogs in total..

Matt makes a statement - “Selling software is dead.”

Matt explains why they don’t have a Wordpress Pro version - paid software - “The problem is that you have to keep bloating the pro version to justify a paid version.”

Matt shows us the pun in Automattic - “I put my name in everything” .. he notes smiling.

Henk: Skyrove (bandwidth sponsor) tweets - “geekrebel: Okay, have set up a 2nd hotspot at #wordcamp . The geeks here managed to bring down the first Skyrove Hotspot, the IS WiFi AND Vodacom 3G!”

Matt shares that an old competitor iBlog used to have more Wordpress MU installs then Wordpress.org. “They were kicking our butt with our own software” and “This was when I started doubting open source”.

Automattic makes money by selling premium services on Wordpress.org - Upgrade - buy custom css, buy domains - Although, not a lot of users upgrade.. Matt deals a blow to Typepad “Once you cut your teeth with blogging you normally upgrade to Wordpress from something like Typepad”

This is the second way we make money - Ads on WP.com - “I personally don’t like ads”

Here’s our model for advertising - If you are logged in theres no ads, no homepage ads, you won’t see ads if you are using Firefox (haaaa.. everyone laughs)… you only see ads if you come from a search engine straight to a permalink page.

We use adsense to monetize WP.com “Adsense is the only ads I ever click on” although, Google is still the competition - Blogger is the only global blogging engine thats still bigger than WP.com

Third - VIP hosting - We provide hosting for huge blogs - Scoble, Lindin labs (second life), LOLCATS

Tip - If you add ?random after any WP.com blog you can see a random post - “I use this to cheer me up by going to random LOLCATZ posts - ICANHASCHEESEBURGER”

Paid licenses of Akismet is another revenue model for Wordpress. “This has been a great business model for us”

I created a service a while back called PING-0-Matic - It was exploited by spammers, and used a ton so resources which became very expensive to run. It pings blog aggregators that you have updated your blog.

Rafiq just threw a JAIL4BAIL tshirt at Matt (Like Microsoft execs getting pie’d) it hit him in the face… he looks confused. Some peeps not happy. “put a leash on Rafiq”

“Software sales is dead - open source is coming”

“Vote with your wallet”

Donate to open source developers instead of paid vendors. Matt donates to open source projects e.g. Apache.

“Who all has kids here?” No one really puts their name up “Jeez get busy!! We need more bloggers” says Matt.. everyone laughs

Matt ends off - sharing his email and website “I actually do check my email” ..

Tyler comes up and asks the first question - “What do you think of Drupal?” Matt: “I’m not really into Pokemon” everyone laughs .. “totally kidding, I love Drupal!”

Tyler asks another question - What do you think of Microblogging - “I totally didn’t see twitter coming, its great.”

Glen from ZASHOW asks “is 4 your unlucky number cuz you skipped it out of the ver releases?”

Matt: “We skipped it because we did a major overhaul” (short version of his answer)

Matt forces everyone to punt their blog before delivering their question to him..

Matt ends off.. its lunch time! Next up Dave Duarte and Rafiq Phillips

I’ve left the conference in favour of watching the Springboks play.. (and we got trashed - shouldve stayed) check out Twitter to follow the remaining action.

Well done to YOUNIQUE and sponsors for hosting a great event.