When I met Matt Mullenweg recently at WordCamp NYC (WordPress WordCamp NYC part 1) I told him that WordPress blogging had helped sell me on the idea of switching over from TMobile to ATT because I now have the capacity to do a decent post, using my mobile device.

However, the first version of WordPress for the iPhone is somewhat limited in what it does - there’s no formatting controls and you can only place photos at the bottom of a post - plus you can’t put any hyperlinks in because the iPhone OS does not have that capability currently.

But I told Matt Mullenwag (who was on his way to a business meeting that concluded with the purchase of Polldaddy by Automatic, Matt’s company) that WordPress ought to make improving the iPhone application a priority, and he was receptive and suggested one might be upcoming soon.

However, I wish I told him to do one more thing - and I’m using this post to test it out - currently the Wordpress appication on the iPhone does not capture blog posts that are in draft mode - it will, however, capture those that are published.

In lieu of having that functionality - and preparing for Emetrics DC, I decided to prepare many of my posts for sessions I plan to attend beforehand, putting in the marketing notes, tags, hyperlinks, all from my laptop, then publishing my post for one minute, getting the data to sync on the WordPress application, then unpublishing my post before Google Reader or Google Alerts can pick it up. Most of the time I was successful but one - darn - my unfinished post was picked up by Google because I must have published it at an interval when Google was crawling my site.

So the first part worked - I could get my post, done on my laptop, transferred over to my iPhone Wordpress application - but …… I had not tested the post to see, if, on the iPhone, I could update the post, and then publish it from the iPhone.

So that’s what I’m going to try to do now - and I’ll write a line or two below this one - this will be proof of concept that my “workaround” for WordPress and the iPhone actually did work.

Ok, I am writing this text from my 3G IPhone and here’s the steps I took.

1. Write the parts of a post ahead of time on laptop or desktop, then publish it.

2. Immediately go to IPhone Wordpress app, sync posts with blog, the blog post should appear in the local draft listings of posts ( however the post has a status of “published” at this point.

3. Unpublish the post from the laptop or desktop.

4. Edit post from IPhone ( this step is what I did just now, here).

5. Finish blip post on IPhone then publish it.

Worked!!!!!!!!!!!!!! No problemo. I just finished the post back on my laptop, because I wanted to indent - everything worked perfectly.

So …. we now have a way to prepare a post, for say .. a conference session, beforehand, with a bunch of links and formatting - send it over to the iPhone - take your notes and finish the post without dragging around a laptop!!!

Thanks Matt Mullenweg for creating this application for the iPhone - and Matt, feel free to improve it, when you get around to it, so I don’t have to publish and unpublish my posts to get them over to the iPhone.

And this last line, I’m writing, again, from my iPhone.

WordPress Rocks -Especially on my 3G IPhone!

I just got a link from Jonathan Dingman, who organized WordCamp NYC last weekend, on the complete videos from the day - I already posted quite a bit on WordCamp NYC, all from my 3G Iphone.

Here’s the posts I did

WordPress WordCamp NYC part 1

WordCamp NYC part 2 Aaron Brazell from TechnoSailor.com, making it into the Big Leagues

WordCamp NYC part 3 Shey David and Interactive Blogging

WordCamp NYC part 4, Jeremy Clarke, Running a Blog Network on WordPress

WordCamp NYC part 5 New york Times Bloggers and Blogging

Final session at WordCamp NYC tonight, and I’m totally saturated, especially with the subject of the last post on security, plus, I did not cover Jen Simmonds who spoke about Video on Wordpress.

Jeremy started at NYT in 2006, in April 2006, started launching blogs at NYT, 152 at present. Active blogs are being written to once a month (65 blogs).

The idea is blogs that are presently not written to (sessions, like Tennis) are still valuable is something the speaker had to win support for.

When a stakeholder came to ask for a blog to develop content and concept, you end up being their therapist, it takes a lot of effort to explain blogs. There are about 500 bloggers at the New York Times, many can’t even operate the default dashboard.

There is a smarter way to deal with this; people need attention to grow, and giving them the right attention to grow.

The Dry Method - documentation on how to use the product could be put in a single place, so when dealing with stakeholders, you can interact at the most important level if their need.

90% of our time is based on administration with people and it seems to make sense to streamline it.

Communities that read a NYT blogs, a particular blogger, building tools for more meaningful discussions.

The Annotated ….. Post a entire speech, then have readers comment on what they read, then take a reference to the comment as a link back to the comment from that section.

Most blogs at the NYT today are at 2.5.

Paul Krugman’s blog is posting several times a week and his column is published twice a week, so a distinction between opinion vs commentary vs blogging.

We started an internal blog at the NYT called “On The Blogs” to distill information about blogging so it doesn’t need to be repeated over and over again, with every new stakeholder.

Well, I feel I have covered as much as I could today and iwabt to catch a SMX East party tonight, briefly, before heading home.

Rising Voices, Jeremy Clarke, write about blogs in other counties and languages.

Voices without Votes, Reuters wanted to know about foreign bloggers opinion of US Presidential Election.

Custom Themes for certain topics and languages.

Other People’s Code:

-Wordpress MU (one copy of filed that is used by all blogs on site); good for sub domains, upgrades and plugins for a lot of blogs. However, you do need some programming to make Wordpress MU bend to your will.

You need to make a decision as soon as you start with multiple blogs.

Multiple languages, need to be careful about comparability issues down the line.

Decentralizied Model with posts that ping the original source. Plugins for translation, backend translation is not that hard, but front end translation is another story.

Note: this session is interesting, but not what I expected. The blog network, in this case, is really more of a non profit foundation, not a typical, for profitable network, which is what I am interested in.

I may stay for a little bit longer, then leave.

As a note, plugins might not be a good long term solution for a large blog networks due to the upkeep, as WordPress gets upgraded.

For large Blog Networks, only allow Plugins your writers feel passionate about.

Also, look at tables being created in your database by the plugin, see what breaks and what works and try up fix what breaks.

Check your theme and make sure it’s stable in all browsers.

Getting hacked, you need to upgrade to the latest version (pretty much under 2.3 can be spammed).

Learn SVN upgrades, fast and secure.

Don’t upgrade directly to your site, keep a local copy and upgrade to it first.

LTS version(2.0x) not a good idea.

Security - back up with a local version, keep up a full backup of all plugins, themes and core. Use this to replace, compare files in case you get hacked.

Role Manager Plugin, very useful, have as few admins as possible,hackers will exploit accounts. The more accounts you have, it is much easier to get hacked, harder to fix.

If you get hacked, treat all code as malicious and check plugins. Treat all users at malacious.

To detect, look at your Apache log file and be careful to rename all admin sites.

There needs to disable PAP in certain directories.

Wow, I’m over saturated with Jeremy’s talk and I feel Sebastian and I need to put a lot more attention to blog security.

Kaltura.com as a platform to do interactive blogging for interactive blogging.

When talk about interactive blogging, we don’t bother about type. We also allow you to pull content from Kaltura’s network of publishers.

It really sounds like Kaltura opens up to us A LOT OF CONTENT, including, soon Wikipedia, all of it legal for use, under Creative Commons. Really cool.

And, for example, Shay David pulled in a Saturday Night Live Sarah Palin Clip and alter it real time using Kaltura’s online editors.

Depending on how you want to set it up, you could allow your readers to remix your posted video/audio content!

Comment: That’s pretty interesting, and I’m not certain many have thought through the possibilites and implications of allowing your users to remix your posted content.

I think Kaltura would be very interesting for large corporate sites running contests, say… Even a online recruitment service … Just a thought.

When you want to take your blog to the next level?

Marketing
Messaging
Brand

Marketing and Social Media, blog is the hub, it is your idenity, pulls all the areas of you, together.

As a director of technolgy at B5 Media, and the fact of the matter is 90% of your traffic will come from new visitors.

Drive by visitors - if you create “Ever Green Content” that is always going to be there, it gets tons of traffic.

Related Content - if you can install a plugin that shows related info, or if you can get them to dive deeper, not just the last 10 posts, that is good.

It’s about your customer, not you, use the search query to give them what they want.

Messaging- know what your community wants. For example, the 10% of your users are RSS subscriber and those have bought into your writing.

Robert Scoble, Starfish paradigm, people often don’t know what they want but may happen onto your site, and may consider you an authority.

Brand - the Holy Grail of marketers
Your users actually control the brand, not the Brand.

Once you have a bad experience with a brand and can’t get it resolved, that brand goes into the toilet, and as a blogger, you can write what you want because your blog is your “hub”.

Corporate Brand is looked at in different ways by various people cited.

Question about less volume and consistency over more volume with less consistency (a few posts a week vs. 30 posts a day? Is engadget’s community as “tight”?). Aaron Brazell thinks quality, less posts, but tighter community is better.

With corporations, companies like Dell, SouthWest Airways, Comcast, have good interactions while some companies may be in the interaction and transparency with users on the web.

How do you convert a first time visitor to a regular reader? Aaron thinks that is a strategy decision. Aaron’s company deals with this issue but he did not want to plug it while speaking.

How to you get better relations with bigger blogs? People on the Head of the “Tail” like FriendFeed, as it’xmore closely monitored.

Note: this session was interesting but did not provide me with much new information.

I’m at Wordcamp NYC at Sun Micro systems on this Sunday with a packed room of people, all devoted to WordPress as a blogging platform.

First up @dingman who organized Wordcamp today and then Hal Stern, VP at Sun, followed by Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress to speak about The State of WordPress.

Preview of what has been done and what is upcoming with 2.7 in November and what is going to be released sometime in the future.

The coding is up to 90 people with 3 reviewers, typically. The metrics are the size of WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org plus downloads per month.

Spam is the biggest problem and they have figured out the motivations of bloggers “Great Post…..” and you need to check the URLs from these false positives.

Most of the WordCamps are organized by locals, except the one San Francisco, and represent the character of the local community and ranged from 50 attendees to 350 attendees on the high end.

Versions 2.3, 2.5 released this year and Google Gears which speeds up performance and the IPhone Application for the IPhone, which I am using right now.

The Iphone app will have comment moderation and Stats (if you use standard stats package).

Theme Directory is monitored carefully and Plugin installs will be much easier with upcoming 2.7 which will have a built in installer application. The same thing could be done with Themes, but haven’t been done yet.

6 Million WordPress.org blogs in existence now.

Intelligent Tails - Plug ins (free market of “features”); plugins such as OpenID and AdSense Manager are a possible indication of what WordPress should adopt in the future, via Web Standards.

Intact, WP-Polls is good because those who take a poll are far more likely to leave a comment, and leaving comments to unique ip addresses are a signol for “Engagement” and posts that have comments are more likely to be ranked well.

With an average of 5 plugins per blog, everyone could be said to be running a different version of WordPress.

Uttimate Seo Plugin, we are looking at packages of like this, and the evolution of an application.

But what happens if a blog runs a 1000 plugins with 800 active, aren’t there bound to be conflicts?

WordPress 2.7, upcoming in November, will have some these features. We learned a lot from the 2.5 update and used the CrazyHorse blog and EyeTracker Software.

One thing to do, with CrazyHorse, which was a Bizzaro version of WordPress, for A/B testing.

Quick and Bulk Edit features being added, direct reply to comments with a parent/child relationship, perhaps to reply to comments by email.

Also, a lot of interface improvements that add more flexability.

Installing Plugins directly and installing instead of downloading manually, will be available with 2.7.

We don’t think existing PlugIns or Themes will be broken in 2.7 and that’s one reason we test new releases of WordPress with popular plugins and themes.

The overall perception is everything you do on 2.5 will be faster in 2.7.

Matt wants to make it easier to add web services like Google Maps embed, with a button, like videos, photos are now, for example.

Greater Intergration with existing site services including user authentication, and, clearly, a lot of creativity can be applied, that often, aren’t.

Matt mentioned that when he was in China, in response to a question, when a searcher does a search that is not approved, their Internet service was dropped for any where between 5 minutes and several days.

He mentioned the Chinese Milk story was in the news and blogs one day, and gone the next (frightening)!

WordPress is now a platform.

Themes for 2009

Security ( a lot of US Government agencies use it), discover and fix problems.

Rich Media (do a better job with audio and video).

Working with The Cloud (Google, Amazon, etc).

Multi-Modal (if your doing a video, why not just put YouTube instead of WordPress). Matt thinks people are going to care more about where they put their data (Twitter for staying in touch with friends) and uses and build on “Network Effects”.

BuddyPress, a social network on WordPress on one side and “Diesel”? Which is a the idea if editing your social graph in one place than having a zillion social networks to maintain. Eventually, we want to tie all the pieces together, but right now wears just getting started.

Tattoos and Design (wordpress logo on shirt and on your forehead?)

Year of Themes, and Themes can incorporate Plug ins, believe it or not. Some themes will take a theme and spawn others.

More questions:

Will WordPress be potted to other programming languages (you could re write WordPress in Phython, but you lose backwards comparability, which was Apple’s mistake).

When will BuddyPress be available? Matt said it is not ready yet, but at the moment, the end of this year.

Will WordPress be offered in Educational Institutions? Yes, training is happening. In fact, the better journalists, the power is being put back to the people that actually create the content.

Is there an IPO upcoming for Automatic (Matt’s Company) and WordPress, which is the public company. Matt is in it for the long haul and his investors include The New York Times. Matt feels his financial interests in line with the community of users and all his code is open source.

I had some footage of Rachel Scotto’s Huddle at Semphonic XChange that took place on Monday morning - plus a few more minutes of things I saw in San Francisco - here’s that footage in a small movie:

I had a wonderful time tonight at the Opening Welcome Reception Streets of San Francisco at Semphonic XChange and had several great conversations as well as hanging out afterwards in the Ritz Hotel Cafe.

I managed to pull my self away from conversation, or to have some more conversations, while filming this online video, hope you enjoy it - thought it is over 9 minutes along.

OK, so blogs are now going to get the Social Networking tools Social Networks  have - according to Read/WriteWeb in a post titled .. The Next Social Networks Will Be Powered By WordPress and Movable Type

“…BuddyPress is a set of WordPress MU specific plugins, each adding a new feature. When complete, BuddyPress will offer extended user profiles, private messaging, groups, friends, status updates, albums, as well as something called “the wire,” which sounds a lot like Twitter.”

Sounds like Movable Type already has Social Networking, as of V4.2

“..With Six Apart’s recent release of Movable Type 4.2, that revolution has begun. The new release provides DIY tools for building your own social networking platform which includes member profiles, forums, friending capabilities, rating of content, and more.”

That reminds me, about a year ago, I thought about how great it would be if you could build a Social Network around a blog.  But then, I thought - well, how many Social Networks can one belong to?  Certainly, not a different Social Network for each blog.  According to the RWW post, that is a problem here as well…

“…the only problem with MT and WordPress going the social networking route is that they are adding yet two more social networks where you will have to establish a profile, find and add friends, etc. Where’s Facebook Friend Connect? Where’s Google Friend Connect? Where’s your portable social graph in all this?

But now, I’m seeing, we don’t really need to have different Social Networks for blogs, all we really need to do or want to to is enable Social Networking features on blogs - and let the Social Graph to the rest.

And, I feel, that’s what we’re going to come to - that point, in the next year.