WordPress: 30% of the Web

If you ever wondered just how many of the world’s websites are powered by WordPress, The Register just reported the number is 30 percent. That is, 30 percent of the world’s websites!

This is based on the web crawling firm W3Techs, which crawls the top 10 million websites as determined by Amazon’s Alex rating service.

WordPress tipped the balance to 30 percent as of yesterday. However, W3Techs provided the caveat that 50.2 percent of the world’s websites don’t run a content management system. 

But that just bolsters the WordPress story, because if that is, indeed, the case, WordPress has over 60 percent share among websites in the world that do run a CMS.

To what does W3Techs attribute WordPress’s success? Ease of use and extensibility. 

To which I can attest — that’s where this Turbo blog is hosted!

Live @ Information On Demand 2012: A Q&A With Nate Silver On The Promise Of Prediction

Day 3 at Information On Demand 2012.

The suggestion to “Think Big” continued, so Scott Laningham and I sat down very early this morning with Nate Silver, blogger and author of the now New York Times bestseller, “The Signal and the Noise” (You can read the review of the book in the Times here).

Nate, who is a youngish 34, has become our leading statistician through his innovative analyses of political polling, but made his original name by building a widely acclaimed baseball statistical analysis system called “PECOTA.”

Today, Nate runs the award-winning political website FiveThirtyEight.com, which is now published in The New York Times and which has made Nate the public face of statistical analysis and political forecasting.

In his book, the full title of which is “The Signal and The Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t,” Silver explores how data-based predictions underpin a growing sector of critical fields, from political polling to weather forecasting to the stock market to chess to the war on terror.

In the book, Nate poses some key questions, including what kind of predictions can we trust, and are the “predicters” using reliable methods? Also, what sorts of things can, and cannot, be predicted?

In our conversation in the greenroom just prior to his keynote at Information On Demand 2012 earlier today, Scott and I probed along a number of these vectors, asking Nate about the importance of prediction in Big Data, statistical influence on sports and player predictions (a la “Moneyball”), how large organizations can improve their predictive capabilities, and much more.

It was a refreshing and eye-opening interview, and I hope you enjoy watching it as much as Scott and I enjoyed conducting it!

Live @ IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit: A Q&A With Liz Strauss

Scott and I sat down for a few rounds of interviews starting yesterday morning here at the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Orlando, Florida.

We had a number of social media luminaries in attendance, and first up was Liz Strauss, founder of the business networking event, SOBcon and author of the ever-popular blog, Successful-Blog.com.

Our topics? Blogging, of course, as well as some insight and background about SOBcon.

My favorite quote from Liz: “Write intelligently from the heart.”

Watch the video to learn what Liz meant by that!

Impressions From SXSW Interactive 2012: Q&A With IBM Social Leaders George Faulkner & Susan Emerick

One of the best parts of attending SXSW Interactive 2012 these days is to meet other IBMers.

That wasn’t always the case — for many years, it was a lonely IBM vista in March at SXSW Interactive.

But this year, all that changed, and two of my good friends and colleagues in particular, George Faulkner and Susan Emerick, spent some time with Scott and I on the IBM “Future of Social” couch discussing how IBM approaches the social media.

George has been a stalwart in IBM social media — I worked with him way back in the Jurassic Age of the social Web, in 2006, on the IBM ShortCuts podcast series.

And Susan has been a digital leader in and of her own right, most recently helping IBMers who haven’t been as active in the social media to get up on their feet and establish their social media eminence.

This thought-provoking interview opens the kimono a bit on the challenges and opportunities a large organization like IBM faces in opening itself up to the social media, and explains how, in fact, IBM gets 400,000 IBMers on the same page so they can successfully change the corporate social media light bulb.

Impressions From SXSW Interactive 2012: Q&A With Newsjacker Dead Head David Meerman Scott

Scott’s interviewed David Meerman Scott several times for developerWorks, but never on camera.  That changed at SXSW Interactive 2012.

If you’re not familiar with Scott’s work, you’re missing out on one of the early voices analyzing and detailing the opportunity presented by social media.  From The New Rules of Marketing & PR  to his latest book, Newsjacking, David Meerman Scott has been a consistent and practical voice in helping organizations large and small, as well as individuals, navigate the contours of the new and social media.

He talks about all that, and the marketing lessons he learned from the Grateful Dead, in our extended interview below.

Live @ Lotusphere 2012: Bill Ives On IBM’s Social Practicing Of What It Preaches

If you’re fortunate to make it to Lotusphere, or any of the other signature IBM events held around the globe every year, you get the opportunity to meet some of the most interesting people: everyone from fellow bloggers to other IBMers to customers to analysts…the list goes on and on.

Just last evening, I was introduced to a gentleman by the name of Bill Ives, an analyst and blogger with Merced Group who writes about knowledge management and social business, among other topics.  As we got to talking, I discovered that Bill had lived in the town I hail from and grew up in, Denton, Texas, once upon a time when he was a wee lad, and who also shares my passion for golf.

Bill has been producing some of his own fine coverage of Lotusphere 2012 and IBM Connect here in Orlando, and I wanted to share the link below to his post on some of IBM’s own social business endeavors.

Keep in touch, Bill, and keep those posts a comin’:

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: IBM as a Social Business

The Netflix Identity Crisis

I got the most extraordinary email earlier today, from Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix.

The email is also posted on The Netflix Blog, if you want to go and read it in its entirety.

Upon the heels of Netflix’s announced price increases, which went over with many Netflix customers like a ton of bricks, Hastings is now announcing that Netflix is going to become the “Sybil” of video delivery services, online and off.

That is to say, Netflix as we know it shall be no more.  The Netflix you used to know — you know, the one that delivered DVDs for years and helped close a few thousand Blockbuster stores — well, they’re now going to be called “Qwikster.”

I know, they clearly don’t have a corporate naming department over there at Netflix…err, Qwikster.

From here on out, Hastings explained, Qwikster will do the DVD deliveries.

Netflix, which used to do DVD deliveries, is no longer going to do deliveries, because they’re going to be the streaming part of the former Netflix.

The new Netflix is the same as the old Netflix, minus that key part of DVD deliveries, which apparently is no longer key.

Ya got all that?

Now, let me just say this: I’m a HUGE fan of Netflix and/or Qwikster.  I’m more a fan of the new Netflix than I am the old, meaning I prefer the online streaming delivery model to the USPS model.

However, there’s one big issue with this move: The better content library seems to be in the Qwikster part of the business, which is exactly the opposite of the way it should be.

The streaming delivery model should be the core of the Netflix model, but everytime I go to Netflix online, I struggle to find new and/or interesting titles that have at least a three star rating (I’ve found that’s the minimal threshold for watching movies on Netflix).

In fact, I’ve been watching mostly foreign films (which I have no problem watching whatsoever) lately, because the Netflix library is much deeper with foreign distributors than American ones (read: Hollywood ones).

And therein lies the real problem. Hollywood is still scared to death of being “Napsterized.”  They want control of their content, come hell or highwater.  And the early deals they stuck with Netflix were made when streaming was still a novelty.

Well, those days are over.  Streaming has grown up: It’s convenient, it’s immediate, and it’s a huge business opportunity, for the Hollywood studios as well as filmmakers around the globe.

There’s no stopping it, not even with Netflix’s latest branding identity crisis.  The big question that remains is, who of the big movie industry players is going to step up and make a deal.  A BIG deal, one that offers a deep and wide movie library that benefits consumers, but identifies a business model that can work for the studios and the Netflix/Qwiksters.

Because if THEY don’t, someone is going to.  Or not.  And then the so-called “Napsterization” of Hollywood will make what happened to the music industry seem like “The Bad News Bears” meets “Moneyball.”

Ultimately, avid movie fans like myself want just a handful of small things, none of which seem too much to ask: a robust library of movie choices at reasonable prices delivered the way we prefer.  Again, let me mention that we’re willing to pay for it!

Increasingly, that channel is going to be via streaming, and no amount of putting-head-under-the-sand by Hollywood studios is going to alter that direction.

Despite all the consumer hysteria about this change that’s already bubbling up across the Blogosphere, I have to say, that probably is the best and most valuable lesson from this whole endeavor: The fact that Hastings made his announcement in a letter he sent out to customers via email and posted on the Netflix blog.

His customers, according to the comments section, are mostly not in favor of this move.  But what’s different is: Hastings and his team are given his customers a direct vehicle response to the message he delivered to them.

Only time will tell whether or not Hastings and team heard them.

The Rain In Spain

What a week. TGIF

Of course,  I’m not going to have much of a weekend.  I’m heading out on the road again (Sing it, Willie!), this time to Barcelona, Spain.

I’m arriving the same day as the Pope.

I don’t think I’ve ever been in the same town as the Pope before, but he’s apparently heading in to consecrate Sagrada Familia, the lovely Gaudi-designed church that’s never been finished (and which I visited in my first trip to Barcelona 10 years ago).

Me, I’m on my way to Barcelona to attend the IBM Industry Summit, an invitation-only event that I’ll be covering in the Turbo blog over the course of the next week.

The central theme of the event based on my pre-briefings is the unique and vast opportunity for innovation across a wide range of industries moving forward, and the role IBM technology, as well as our industry frameworks and expertise, can play across the gamut of industries IBM serves, from finance to public sector to telecomm and beyond.

I’ll be a fly on the industry wall, taking notes and sharing key insights and sound bytes, so be sure to start tuning in early next week, and to also follow the #ibmsym hashtag on Twitter.

I’m going to travel lighter than usual this trip.  I’ll be carrying along my new HP Pavilion notebook, my iPhone 4, and the iPad.

That’s it.  If that sounds like a lot, I had my MacBook Pro, a Dell Latitude, the iPad, and the iPhone on that last trip to Information on Demand in Vegas.

No matter the tools, look for the posts starting on Monday, and I’ll be sure to keep a look out for your comments…and the Pope.

Full Disclosure

It’s a good thing the U.S. Federal Trade Commission released its new changes to its Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising yesterday.

They were last updated in 1980, and, well, the world has changed a little bit since then.

With the new guidelines, bloggers, in particular, are impacted.

Moving forward, bloggers who fail to disclose they have received freebies when they write about a product can now be fined up to $11,000 per post.

For the record, the last freebie I remember getting was a really cool FlipVideo camera at the Search Engine Strategies Conference, from the search metrics firm Covario.

However, I didn’t blog about it, so I’m probably being overly transparent here.

However, it sounds like with these new guidelines, that’s the order of the day.

While I’m at it, I may as well go ahead with some other full disclosures.

In the 1980s, I listened to Rick Springfield…and actually liked some of his songs.  REO Speedwagon, I can honestly say, I hated just about every song.

I was a member of the Future Farmers of America, and in fact, was the actual president.  I’m sure I’m the only FFA president who wore Van Halen t-shirts and topsiders.

I went to rodeo school once, way back in 1982.  The horse threw me and dragged me around the Kowbell Arena in Mansfield, Texas, and thus ended my illustrious rodeo career.

When I lived in New York City, I was a bicycle messenger on two separate occasions, and got hit by three different cabs…including the last one which “doored” me and sent me in my only ambulance ride to Bellevue hospital.

When I was in Paris once, I ate at a McDonalds (although I have to say, they took the Egg McMuffin and really made it their own — it was the best Egg McMuffin I’d ever had, and McDonalds is definitely not paying me to say that).

Worse yet, that particular McDonalds was literally down the street from Le Louvre.

I also ate at a McDonalds in Tokyo (it was the cheapest breakfast I could find), and their Egg McMuffins weren’t bad, but not nearly as good as the French.

The fact that the French make a better Egg McMuffin than we do in America is definitely worth the price of full disclosure, which in this case is nada, zip, zero.

I still smoke cigarettes, mostly when I drink and heavily when I’m traveling in Europe and Asia, not nearly as much back on the home front.

My favorite domestic beer is Budweiser, which in the spirit of full disclosure can’t, I don’t believe, still be identified as being a domestic beer since Anheuser-Busch was bought by InBev.

My favorite imported beer would probably be a three-way toss up between Westmalle, Bass, and Guinness…and for the record, I’ve visited Belgium, England, and Ireland.

My new favorite blogging software is the one I’m currently blogging on, WordPress.  WordPress apparently doesn’t charge me anything to use their blogging software, but they also don’t pay me anything to say good things about them.

I’ll be sure to tell you if that changes anytime soon.