No fighting no biting

As you know that we are attending BlogWorld Expo East in New York City. We had a pleasure of attending Amy Porterfield’s (@AmyPorterfield) session in which she shared why more people aren’t reading your blog. She shares how to create bite sized content that get devoured and shared. Here is a summary of his presentation: People are social media obsessed. Why? Because it is easy to read, easy to access, immediately gratifying, entertaining, and it can make you smarter fast. We are now hard wired to take in content in bite sized pieces and we want instant gratification. The big problem bloggers have is not enough traffic and uninteresting content. The solution to this is to steal key elements from social media and apply them to your blog. Some of these are stylistic, some are deeper content strategies. Rule one: Instant rapport. The idea of the captive audience is dead, there is no way to build rapport. People make snap decisions, and click constantly. So start each post as a new … [Read more...] about Why more people aren’t reading your blog: how to create bite sized content that get devoured and shared

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Over the past week, I’ve been thinking a lot about George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. I have been thinking about white supremacy, the injustice that Black women and men are standing up against across the world, and all the injustices I can’t know, and don’t see. The WordPress mission is to democratize publishing, and to me, that has always meant more than the freedom to express yourself. Democratizing publishing means giving voices to the voiceless and amplifying those speaking out against injustice. It means learning things that we otherwise wouldn’t. To me, it means that every voice has the ability to be heard, regardless of race, wealth, power, and opportunity. WordPress is a portal to commerce; it is a canvas for identity, and a catalyst for change. While WordPress as an open source project may not be capable of refactoring unjust judicial systems or overwriting structural inequality, this does not mean that we, the WordPress community, are powerless. WordPress … [Read more...] about Equity and the Power of Community

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WordPress.org is officially joining the protest against Senate Bill 968: the Protect IP Act that is coming before the U.S. Senate next week. As I wrote in my post a week ago , if this bill is passed it will jeopardize internet freedom and shift the power of the independent web into the hands of corporations. We must stop it. On January 18, 2012 many sites around the web — from small personal blogs to internet institutions like Mozilla , Wikipedia , reddit , and I Can Has Cheezburger? — will be going dark in protest and to drive their visitors to sites like americancensorship.org to take action and help fight the passage of the Protect IP Act. So will WordPress.org. If you want to join the protest by blacking out your WordPress site or applying a ribbon, there is now a variety of blackout plugins in the WordPress.org plugins directory . While joining the protest in this manner is laudable, please don’t forget to also make those phone calls to U.S. Senators — they’re … [Read more...] about Internet Blackout Day on January 18

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You are an agent of change. Has anyone ever told you that? Well, I just did, and I meant it. Normally we stay away from from politics here at the official WordPress project — having users from all over the globe that span the political spectrum is evidence that we are doing our job and democratizing publishing, and we don’t want to alienate any of our users no matter how much some of us may disagree with some of them personally. Today, I’m breaking our no-politics rule, because there’s something going on in U.S. politics right now that we need to make sure you know about and understand, because it affects us all. Using WordPress to blog, to publish, to communicate things online that once upon a time would have been relegated to an unread private journal (or simply remained unspoken, uncreated, unshared) makes you a part of one of the biggest changes in modern history: the democratization of publishing and the independent web. Every time you click Publish, you are a part of that … [Read more...] about Help Stop SOPA/PIPA

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Today is the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the (20)eleventh year, and in several parts of the world, it is a holiday related to war. In the U.S., where I live, it is Veterans Day, which honors military veterans. In much of Europe, today is Armistice Day or Remembrance Day, commemorating the armistice signed at the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918 that ended the fighting on the Western Front in World War I. Whether serving in the military, living in an area of unrest or attack, having friends or family in the fray, or just being human enough to think war sucks (there’s really no gentler way to say that, is there?), war impacts most people in the world today. The mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing. Sometimes we’re fortunate enough for that to mean providing a platform for communication that helps people work toward peace in their communities and around the world. Sometimes it means providing a platform for keeping people … [Read more...] about Taking WordPress to War

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