WordPress celebrates 10 years of growth
Free blogging tool that started as an open source project has grown to become basis for nearly 20 percent of the top online destinations Initially a free blogging tool, it has since become the backbone for many of the Web's most popular sites. WordPress began as an open source project, a free publishing tool that people could adopt, use and tweak as they wished - and still can. About eight years ago, Mullenweg founded Automattic in San Francisco, the parent company for WordPress.com, which helps hosts WordPress sites, and other services for WordPress such as an antispam service. Over the years, it's seen its share of rivals, from Xanga, Google's Blogger and, most recently, Tumblr, which Yahoo acquired in May for more than $1 billion. Mullenweg spoke to The Chronicle just before the start of the annual WordCamp San Francisco conference this weekend, which is expected to draw more than 1,000 WordPress devotees to programs at the Mission Bay Conference Center. The big shift has been how it's changed from being just something that people used just for blogs to being something that they build entire websites or applications on top of. The result of this has been that because there's so much more flexibility and so many more options for customization, it started to gain some significant market share of the top websites in the world, actually over 18 percent now. Some say that there are more voices now but others complain that the Internet is just filled with cat videos. What I've been most excited about in the intersection of blogging and journalism is how it has shifted more power to the individual voices, to the writers. [...] I am a big fan of anything that shifts the balance of power back to the people actually doing the work. What do you make of Yahoo's acquisition of Tumblr? Shortly after the news came out, Mullenweg said on his blog that 72,000 blogs were imported from Tumblr to WordPress in an hour.