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WordPress.tv: Automattic goes television

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WordPress.tvOne week ago, Automattic launched a brand-new WordPress-centered video site: WordPress.tv features various screen casts, presentations and tutorial videos on the world's leading blog content management system. The available clips are bound to water the mouths of beginners and pros, as they range from basic explanations like “How to post a blog entry” to all the advanced presentations held during last year's WordCamp.

Keeping Automattic's mission statement in mind, this launch is a huge step in my opinion – videos and screen casts are extremely helpful when it comes to understanding the potential of WordPress:

Blogging is too hard. Through WordPress we?ve enabled millions of people to effortlessly publish to the web. Now we want to enable millions more.

Some of my friends didn't have any programming in mind when they started their blogs. But it seems that sooner or later almost everyone feels the strong urge to start tinkering with his theme, installing new plugins and so on. So since the technology is a part of blogging, ease of access is the way to go. Now I'm fully aware of the fact that competitors like Typepad take a totally different approach, but to me fading out the underlying scripts doesn't make too much sense in the long run, and this is why I'm very excited about the new video repository, especially since there's much more goodness to come:

On WordPress.tv, you'll find tutorials for both WordPress self-installs and WordPress.com to help you get blogging fast and hassle-free. We?ve kicked things off with the basics ? now you can shape what comes next. Just drop us a line and let us know what you?d like to see added.

There's a contact form for entering your own videos (just take a look at the guidelines) and a commenting function. Personally, I would like to see two new features added in the near future: a basic editorial “rating” (beginner, advanced pro) and a user rating (WP-Rating might do a great job on that). Once again, congrats to Matt and his team – I'm positive that during the next month a couple of online enterprises are going to copy WP's idea and open their own niche-Youtubes. Here's an interview with Matt on the way Auttomatic operates – quite interesting stuff:

Get your very own Perpetuum Webile!

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The social web is all about user participation, right? Well, maybe. Kind of. But the truth is that the web 2.0 these days is all about syndication: call it cross-, auto- or whatever-posting, feeds are running wild. Just take friendfeed: ff posts to facebook, twitter posts to facebook… soup.io, an Austrian Startup, also has nice and nifty auto-syndication features. The same can be said about tumblr. So what happens when you let these two mighty beasts battle, umm, I mean talk to, each other?

Would one achieve eternal RSS action Zen that way? Yes, it is that simple, actually – you don't even have to spend the best years of your live in a monastery:

  1. Set up an account at Soup.io, one at – and if you wish, one at friendfeed.
  2. Enter your tumblr username in soup.io's “external services” list, then enter the soup.io feed as an external tumblr feed. Optional: link both feeds to your new friendfeed account (rss sources).
  3. No third step, you're done: you just built your very own perpetuum webile!

What's going to happen? Let's say you post something on soup. It then gets repostet on tumblr, which again triggers a posting at soup which in turn… you get the point. And friendfeed documents it all. Ain't that great? Finally, the human factor has been eliminated from the communication formula. When I was a kid, one needed an analogue cam, a TV and a darkened room to achieve endless loop-back effects; the results were more vivid, and the visual far more interesting though than my perpetuum webile. I tried this, check it out:

perpetuumwebile.soup.io/
perpetuumwebile.tumblr.com
perpetuumwebile.tumblr.com

What really happens is rather boring though: after a couple of reposts the whole process comes to and end: virtual entropy is kicking in… no endless fun.

Can you think of any other such feedback-mechanisms? Of course I integrated my tweets, my friendfeed *and* my blog with my facebook accounts – now triple actions are swarming all around. A hash key as lowest common denominator could probably subdue the chaos – but for now let's rejoice and look forward to the age of machines that are almost as dumb as humans: a true scientific breakthrough.