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Year One at Automattic

Wild to think that it’s already been a year since I posted “Thanks Dow Jones, Hello Automattic” on my very first day at Automattic.

Thinking about the last year, it’s easy to sum up the experience so far with just two words: Amazing & Rewarding. A bit cheesy, I know, but 100% true 🙂

My other strong feeling about the last year is that above all else, people matter. When I think back to some of my M&A work in prior jobs, and various due-diligence projects where we did a deep dive on a company, I always held to the belief that beyond a stellar P&L, smart biz model, and various technology assets — what made a company truly great were the people.

And in that regard I’ve been fortunate in my current role at Automattic to be surrounded by smart, talented and motivated people who are also truly the kind of people you want to hang out with and play pool 🙂

Lastly with these kind of anniversaries, it’s always fun to look back and see what’s changed. Here are a few stats for WordPress.com from when I joined VS today:

May/June 2007 – Biggest traffic day: 8.07 million pageviews
May/June 2008 – Biggest traffic day: 35.5 million pageviews

May/June 2007 – Number of blogs on WordPress.com: A bit over 1 million
May/June 2008 – Number of blogs on WordPress.com: 3.36+ million

May/June 2007 – Unique visitors to WordPress.com: 40 million
May/June 2008 – Unique visitors to WordPress.com: 168 million

And as they say — the best is yet to come.

Dave Pell’s Addictomatic Launches

My buddy Dave Pell, of Rollyo and Davenetics fame, launched Addict-o-matic yesterday.  Addict-o-matic is an innovative yet simple to use news aggregator meant to give you a very quick snapshot of what’s going on based on a search term / topic.  Dave describes it as a service that:

… searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what’s up and what’s now.

I’ve been beta testing it for a bit, and I really like how it doesn’t require login credentials even when customizing.  Rather, it creates a unique URL you can share with friends.  You can also choose which sources you want displayed including WordPress.com search results.

Techcrunch reviewed it and said:

Addictomatic sports a very clean and manageable layout – a necessity given the amount of information it throws at you. Users can add, remove, and rearrange the location of each headline feed, and layouts can be saved by simply creating a bookmark. The site is also offering plugins to integrate Addictomatic into browser search fields.

The very smart Seth Godin agrees:

It’s pretty simple. It gives you a popurls type view of the web for any search term you can imagine. Nicely done.

Definitely worth checking out @ addictomatic.com

ShareWP: A Digg Like Site For All Things WordPress

Early days — but an interesting concept (via planetozh):

ShareWP is a digg-like site (using Pligg I think) dedicated solely to, obviously, WordPress. It seems fairly new (domain registered a few months ago, only a handful or registered users) and I think it has some potential: overall it’s nicely done, and well focused on WordPress, a topic that other socialish sites such as Reddit or Digg seem to neglect

[visit sharewp.info]