If you listed the habits of successful people, tracking and measuring would be near the top of that list. I see it with people, companies, and teams that I work with. I see it in my own behavior.
Fred Wilson writes on Tracking and Measuring. Lack of measurement — picking stats and watching them before and after a launch — is one of the most common mistakes I see product teams make, certainly inside of Automattic.
People are abuzz because it looks like the W3Techs survey of the web now has WordPress at 25% market share.
Sometimes it goes up and down through the course of a month, but it’s still a pretty fun milestone that we can now say about one in four websites are now powered by the scrappy open source underdog with its roots stretching all the way back to a single person in Corsica, France. We should be comfortably past 25% by the end of the year.
The big opportunity is still the 57% of websites that don’t use any identifiable CMS yet, and that’s where I think there is still a ton of growth for us (and I’m also rooting for all the other open source CMSes).
If you want to celebrate with us come to the first-ever WordCamp US event next month in Philadelphia (tickets still available) — it’s shaping up to be an amazing event. We just published the schedule and there are some amazing speakers and sessions.
I was wondering the other day how many miles of road were in every state, and guessed that Texas must be the highest. It turns out it is, according to this list of the road mileage of every state. It’s about 70% more than the runner-up, California. After TX and CA, it’s Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, and Missouri.
Tech blog idea: A site that covers the top headlines on Techmeme 6, 12, or 18 months after they happened, and explores the delta between what people said was going to happen when they raised funding, or did an acquisition, and what actually happens after time has run its course. We keep covering announcements like they matter. Can also compare analyst and commentator predictions for claim chowder.
In this video Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka discuss World 1-1, or the very first level in the very first Super Mario Bros. It’s fascinating how every element on the level is designed to introduce you to a mechanic of the game, or how Mario moves and jumps. This is interesting if you like Mario, but also important for any developer in any medium who is thinking about the NUX (new user experience) of their product. I sometimes joke that in WordPress we put people on the boss monster level the first time they enter the dashboard. There have been improvements but still so much to do to naturally introduce people to our interface.
When I was last in Tokyo I sat down with Lifehacker Japan and they have a long interview in Japanese and some photos from the trip. I don’t remember what I said, but the Google Translate version is pretty hilarious.