WordPress creator Mullenweg is many bloggers' best friend
SAN FRANCISCO -- While still in high school in Texas, Matt Mullenweg created blogging software he hoped would be easier and prettier to use. Less than six years later, Mullenweg's WordPress has become the No. 2 blogging platform behind Google's Blogger, signing up 10,000 new bloggers daily.
WordPress has become so entrenched on the Web that many of the biggest names use it now — a roster that includes CNN, Fox News and The New York Times, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Coca-Cola and General Electric, along with millions of ordinary bloggers.
"People might start with LiveJournal or Blogger, but if they get serious, they'll graduate to WordPress. We try to cater to the more powerful users," says Mullenweg, 25.
WordPress.com— where folks sign up to create their blogs — was the 37th-most-visited site in December, attracting 24 million visitors, according to measurement firm ComScore Media Metrix. Worldwide, WordPress hosts 12 million blogs, which attracted just over 200 million readers in December.
WordPress is free for anyone to use on their own. Business customers who want technical support pay $2,500 to $5,000 a year through Automattic, the start-up Mullenweg founded in 2005 to operate WordPress. Automattic also offers fee-based anti-spam software services.
WordPress is "open-source" software, which means that anyone can access and contribute to the program code, with plug-ins and downloads that can take a WordPress blog to new heights. Examples include ways to add contact forms, reader statistics, comment spam filters and "page-flip" photo galleries to your blog.
It was the open-source approach that persuaded Danny Sullivan, who runs the Search Engine Land website, to switch recently to the WordPress platform from rival Movable Type, which is owned by Six Apart.
So many of Search Engine Land's editors and programmers preferred working with WordPress, "that it just made it easier," Sullivan says.
Software has a big fan: CNN
CNN runs 30 blogs, and they're all created the same way the general consumer does it: Programmers go to WordPress.com, sign up and create.
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