However a more interesting twist came to the story when someone (a self proclaimed tech-geek) published a post describing how WordPress could be used to create a mobile-photoblog. It came to me through two WordPress folks: Ian Stewart who I follow on twitter – retweeted James Huff (who I have not heard of before) a comment about and link to the story:

Upset about the new Instagram TOS? Read “How to Create a Free Mobile Photoblog on WordPress.com” wp.me/p1uYyO-10j

— James Huff (@MacManXcom) December 18, 2012

I read the post and it frustrated me and as a consequence A short dialogue ensued between James and myself. It branched to an irrelevant and semantic discussion … and died. So this is an attempt to bring more clarity and focus into my intentions and thoughts.

I think WordPress should provide a viable alternative to almost all “social networks”. I think it has a responsibility to do so if it is to live up to its proclaimed vision of “democratizing publishing”. I think it’s failing to do so systemically because of user experience issues (and I say this despite being an avid WordPress user and the inarguable popularity and role WordPress plays in/on the Internet).

In that context (my own) this is how I read James’s twitter update:

• Are you upset about the abusive turn in the Instagram terms of Service?
• If so you may want to checkout a WordPress photoblog as an alternative.
• And this link will show you how.

And I got excited. During recent weeks WordPress has been celebrating interesting launches of speciaized WordPress implementations. In that spirit I thought that WordPress finally took on the responsibility of creating a specialization that would create an alternative to Instagram and what great timing to do so … when Instagram joins the Facebook stampede over what should be inherent Internet freedoms. You see, everything about WordPress, including its terms of service, is built around protecting personal freedoms in the spirit of “democratizing publishing”.

… and then I read the post and freaked out. It takes a geeky bias/ignorance/arrogance to assume that anybody but a geek would want and be able to walk through the steps described there to create a “free mobile photo blog”. I could go through every one of the steps and point out its weaknesses, but instead I will describe what I believe could/should be done.

There needs to be ONE WordPress app to download and install on your mobile device. Instagram has already demonstrated the proper workflow for such an app so it may be a good look at it for reference. On installation this app would automatically open a WordPress blog pre-installed with a pre-selected theme and plugins … whatever is needed to provide the desired Instagram like functionality. Part of the app installation should be connecting to Facebook/Twitter accounts for social sharing. On the website itself, at most that theme may offer some basic all-front-end customization such as background color and header. The end-user should not need to encounter the way-overloaded-and-terribly-complicated (to non-geeks and non-WordPress trained people) WordPress back-end at all. This way many people will not need to use anything but the app to take their photos and the and then a browser to view them (sharing would happen automatically).

Making the current “blogging tool/CMS” WordPress disappear is a key part of making WordPress available to may more people. Hence my later comment to James that this is what is needed to increase WordPress’s reach from 60 million to 600 million. That’s where I’d like to see it. That’s where I believe it has a responsibility to be. In my mind that responsibility has been neglected due to the over-geekiness of WordPress development process and its core ecosystem.

As I wrote a while back to Ian Stewart:

“One of the obstacles to a healthy democracy is getting everyone to vote. The right to a vote is not enough if it isn’t realized. There are commercial online forces taking away or taking advantage of people’s voices. Democratizing Publishing is a noble cause – but comes with responsibility … WordPress is neglecting people who are not proficient enough to use it – kind of like “money buying power” only with WordPress its “geek knowledge buying power” – and both are not right … and not very democratic.”

On a more personal note … to James. I offered to share these thoughts with you by email. You replied by sending me to either (a) comment on the post or (b) to get in line with 8000 requests per week processed by 10 people or (c) apply for a job at Automattic. Would it have been so difficult and painful to open a channel for direct feedback? That was another example of the arrogance I am talking about. It is not pleasant to encounter it.

With that wish in my heart I’ve asked myself how I would revive Intense Debate. I believe that the wrong way to do so would be to try and play catch-up with the competition. Intense Debate is lagging too far behind to do that and attempting to do so would cause it to lose any sense of identity. However I envision a direction of evolution that is only open to Intense Debate, one that I believe may propel not just it, but “commenting” in general in a new direction that is aligned with the WordPress vision to “democratize publishing”. My vision is rooted in my belief that many commenters are potentially closet bloggers/publishers.

I myself have public profiles on both IntenseDebate (because I also use it on my websites) and Disqus (because I’ve commented on sites that use it). The result is that in addition to my blog I have two additional “mini-blogs” – both aggregates of the comments I’ve published on the two commenting systems. This isn’t how I want things to be and this isn’t how things should be.

My blog is my only online-home and that’s what I want it to continue to be. The only other publishing platform I use is Twitter and for that I use a WordPress Plugin that creates a weekly archive of my tweets and publishes it as streamlined posts on my blog (I am looking forward to the day where I can also initiate twitter updates directly from my site). Similarly, if I publish a comment on someone else’s blog, I’d like that comment to appear on my blog (in it’s proper place in the timeline). What more, if someone replies to my comment (still on someone else’s blog) I’d like that reply to also be stored and presented on my blog.

I believe that Intense Debate and WordPress should merge:

• All WordPress.com or WordPress.org blogs should inherit the Intense Debate (present and future) capabilities to become comment aggregators, moderators and servers (a behavior that is already partially present).
• Intense Debate should become either a transparent routing service or disappear altogether (that depends on technicalities that are beyond me at this point).
• WordPress needs to introduce a new post-type “comment”.
• A theme (potentially a theme category) should be produced for “comment-blogs” – blogs that are an aggregate of comments. This “theme” already exists in a round-about way in the Intense Debate profile – it needs to be transformed into a proper WordPress Theme based on the “comment” post-type.

When the migration is ready to go all Intense Debate profiles should become WordPress blogs. With it, many “commenters” may realize that they are actually “bloggers” and have been for some time. They may find that they have unknowingly created a body of content that is worthy of publishing and sharing with others. This realization may also prompt them to further evolve and expand their online expression  – which would be easy and seamless since their commenting platform would now be WordPress.

With this new platform in place it would be possible to explore application and interfaces with other platforms. I would love to see a Facebook application that may draw people away from handing over and anonymizing their voice on Facebook. A Facebook application would continue to feed the Facebook stream but it would also redirect content to a self-owned blog (hosted wherever). I would also like to see an “open commenting protocol” that other commenting services (like Disqus) and publishing services (like Tumblr) would embrace to enable this form of distributed and cross-platform commenting.

I believe that Intense Debate, due to its close affiliation with WordPress (both in code and in business) is a unique position to explore this kind of integration. I believe this will catapult it into a new direction where it will become one again be a thought leader. Right now its either stagnating or dying. I believe it has nothing to lose and everything to gain.

“This further raises the question, what else should we bring to the front to enable a better visual connection between options and website appearance?”

If you are such a person I invite you to read this great list of 25 Non-Financial Benefits of Business Blogging and this post about how a blog can be useful in Bootstrapping a Business.

I would also like to contribute two more of my own:

1. Reflection – honest blogging will support you in an honest exploration of purpose. The commitment to write, the search for what to write about, the reflections offered by readers … all work to place and keep you on a path of reflection. The more honest you keep it the more clear the reflection will be (though you should be prepared, honest reflection is not necessarily a pleasant or easy process).
2. Unknown – by putting yourself out there you are joining one of the most precious qualities of the Internet – you just don’t know who will come across you, in what context and for what reason. In the hyper-informed life we live … an injection of unknown can be priceless.

“this sounds nice but superficial … I would wish for something deeper and more substantial …”

Ian did not approve the comment but did write me to ask what I meant. I wrote him a lengthy email. He replied and said I should post what I wrote. So here goes nothing:

Hello Ian,

First, THANK YOU, really THANK YOU for writing me. I wasn’t expecting that.

Introduction (for context)

I rarely voice my thoughts on WordPress anymore. I don’t think anyone is listening. I used to reach out to Jane (I guess that if Jane will remember me it will be as a nudge) and occassionaly poke Matt. I am not a developer (though I know more about development then I care to admit – and don’t care to become one) so I can’t really get in on the conversation. I used to be a software designer … now I am homesteader in a remote village in Romania.

I don’t follow WordPress blogs much anymore. You are my only link to the project (I follow you on Twitter) – and that is because I still use Thematic exclusively for all my themes and have great appreciation for your work. So REALLY thank you for asking.

I used to dump my thoughts on WordPress in a ad-hoc blog – though it is mostly dormant: http://ontekusuto.iamronen.com

Though at first my answer will not appear to relate to themes, I promise you, it does.

Idea1: Frontend Admin

I think WordPress development in general, themes included, is pointed in a self-indulgent direction. Self-indulgent in the sense that it caters first and foremost to the “geeks” who make it or use it. It is a typical development issue (apparently both in closed source and open source) – developers develop first and foremost for themselves. Even the recent discussion around”options” is a geeky one. The “geeky” side of me has tremendously enjoyed post-types, post-formats, custom taxonomoies,etc. But for the end-user in me WordPress hasn’t had any substantial changes since I think 2.7. It has gone through refinements, some asthetic upgrades.

I strongly recommend an excellent and fun book on this: http://iamronen.com/2007/08/the-inmates-are-running-the-asylum-by-alan-cooper/

For there to be a serious conversation around these issues there has to be a context … and to me the only context that counts is people – end-users. Now with WordPress one could argue that this is a huge problem because there are so many diverse users. However I do believe there is a way around this problem. Fortunately WordPress has a clear and loudly communicated purpose, to “democratize publishing” … and here’s the thing … that has been accomplished. Anyone who wants to have an online voice either already uses WordPress, knows about WordPress or knows someone who knows about WordPress. It is an amazing achievement. However from a user-experience perspective WordPress could have stopped at 2.7 and still attained this position.

From what I can tell, though the overall numbers of WordPress users are impressive, … is expansion is also crawling forward. It only seems to jump substantially when there is some kind of merger or another platform goes under. I suspect this will be even more true if you filtered out active blogs from “play blogs”.

However I can point out at least 3 groups of people who are already publishers but are not on WordPress nor can they consider it as an option for their needs:

1. Commenters – anyone who leaves comments is a blogger. Anyone with an IntenseDebate or Disqus profile is a blogger (I think there needs to be super easy, almost transparent though optional migration path from an IntenseDebate profile to a WordPress blog – I envision a future without comments – I sure wish I could automatically integrate my IntenseDebate & Disqus comments within my WordPress blog – a new post-format “post-comment”!).
2. Tumblr – in my mind Tumblr exists because WordPress UI is not right for them – it is so complicated that many (many millions) of people can’t handle it. Had Tumblr been open-source I would not be worried – but it is a commercial platform. So, in my mind this is WordPress being out of tune with its own purpose by driving people away from a democractic platform to a commercial one.
3. Facebook – though there is much social garbage on Facebook – there is also much content (again many millions). There are people there with a voice that don’t know that (a) they have a voice and (b) they’ve sold their voice. WordPress is not an alternative for them … again not because of capability but because of inappropriate UI.

So what has all this got to do with Themes? I used to believe that WordPress admin needs a MAJOR simplification (http://ontekusuto.iamronen.com/okwaterdown/). I still think it needs it and that it is doable as a plugin however I now believe it needs to be taken a (major) step forward. The first step in this direction was taken by the P2 theme which included post-creation in the theme. Well that is a direction that definitely needs to be explored further.

• Theme options? how about bringing them to the blog itself. The doorway already exists with the new admin-bar.
• How about a quick post interface from the front end?
• How about an upload image (one image, no question asked).
• How about authoring an “aside” (and sending it to Twitter for me) without having to leave my blog or having to go through “publishing a post”.
• How about a small theme API and library for enabling other developers to hook into and expand such capabilities

I believe this kind of capability can open the door to a whole new UI domain for WordPress where important and interesting things can happen.

Idea2: CSS Magic

So you managed to let people choose a background color and a header image … pardon my french but … big woopeedoo.

How about letting people choose one color and have a theme palette generated around it. How about giving them a few control like good old TV’s – brightness and contrast to modify the look of the theme. If you want to get adventurous … let them choose another color. Make it fun … make it a game!

I know that there have been some efforts on CSS modification libraries (I even recall someone working on a Plugin for this … I think it was a summer-of-code project). That needs to be coupled with some color-palette knowledge (mathematic and asthetic) … and there is some magic there.

How about exploring an API of sorts to let other theme developers integrate this capability into their themes?

How many junk themes would become redundant it people had a little more (fun) control over the looks of their site?

Again – I’m thinking of millions of other people (less serious bloggers) who I want to see on WordPress.

Summary

These are just two off the top of my head … and this is without being in a conversation with others and this is without having WordPress on my mind much (our water supply froze, the chainsaw is on the ritz and the car wouldn’t start for a week due to freezing temperatures).

One of the obstacles to a healthy democracy is getting everyone to vote. The right to a vote is not enough if it isn’t realized. There are commercial online forces taking away or taking advantage of people’s voices. Democratizing Publishing is a noble cause – but comes with responsibility … WordPress is neglecting people who are not proficient enough to use it – kind of like “money buying power” only with WordPress its “geek knowledge buying power” – and both are not right … and not very democratic.

Thank you for your precious and much appreciated ear-time.

I wish you and everyone at WordPress a prolific and inspiring 2012.

All Things Good
Ronen

I believe this is important. I believe other attempts have failed. I believe WordPress has a responsibility to take on this challenge.

From this point on this post will be more technical.

Infrastructure

I believe that there are three key elements, already in existence, that need to come together to create a WallPress:

• WordPress Posts are the most basic publishing element needed. It is adaptive for different types of content via post formats, it is time-stamped, it can be commented on and it (together with it’s comments) can be distributed via RSS.
• rssCloud by Dave Winer is an enhancement of RSS that, at the end of the day, makes it faster – closer to real-time. To my understanding it should be technically possible to create a WordPress Plugin that will turn any WordPress installation into an rssCloud server (able to both broadcast and receive).
• WordPress Themes are a highly versatile mechanism for creating a front-end. It has already been demonstrated (see “P2 Theme“) that it is possible to publish content from the front end blog view without needing to access the admin. I believe this capability is critical to the needed user experience

User Experience

I feel it is important to remember (especially amongst developers who I hope will come across this post) that this entire post is written with a “non-blogger” user in mind. The current WordPress administration is way too complicated for these users. They do not see themselves as content publishers – they simply want to say what’s on their mind to their social circles.

Note: I believe that, if a bridge is built, that many people who are currently “non-bloggers” may mature into bloggers. Many already have … but they are confined by the state-of-mind imposed by Facebook. Moving onto a WordPress driven platform will inevitably provoke them into blogging-consciousness.

If you strip off the user-experience from the Facebook wall – what you have is an RSS aggregator of posts and comments. However its the user experience that makes it attractive and accessible to many people who are not inclined to take on a more demanding technical learning curve. WordPress’ administration (content management) user interface is far off this mark.

This is what makes WordPress Themes a core element in creating a Facebook alternative. A Theme could be developed to offer an alternate, simple and clean route for publishing.

Integration

What follows is a description of the operation of a working account.

• Users publish “aside” posts from a P2 like front end.
• rssCloudServer distributes a post package that includes:
  • Post Type (aside, post, image, link, gallery, etc.).
  • Post Excerpt (automatically extracted/generated based on the post type).
  • Post Content.
  • Metadata on how to connect to the post’s comment thread.
  • Metadata on how to subscribe to the post’s comment thread.
  • Metadata on how to _POST a comment to the post’s comment thread.
  • Metadata on how to _POST a like to the post.
• rssCloudServer listens for post related traffic (comments, likes, re-posts)
• A push (rssCloudServer to theme) or polling (theme to rssCloudServer) mechanism is used to keep the theme updated in “real time”.

Enhancements

I believe that the Theme part of this project can and should evolve to supply other interactions – such as friends (and friend requests), photo galleries, a contact form, etc. Though all of these interactions are inherently possible in WordPress, they need to be designed an implemented so that streamlined functionality can be achieved from within the theme itself without having to access the admin.

Bootstrapping

It will be challenging to get this started – to get people off Facebook and onto WallPress. My thoughts on this are:

• It needs to be initiated regardless of adoption challenges.
• There will be early adopters – criticism of Facebook is abundant – action for an alternative is lacking or shortcoming.
• There needs to be research into transitional features such as:
  • Getting started by scanning an existing Facebook accounts and migrating the information from it to a WallPress account.
  • Staying connected and syncing to a Facebook account to stay in touch with people who are still on Facebook.
  • Sending invitations to other Facebook users to migrate their accounts.
  • Harnessing the WordPress community to develop further features and capabilities that may compete with Facebook’s centralized feature development.

The site has a very basic design that has gone through numerous revisions all driven by its evolving content. It didn’t go through any branding – it’s logo is a bit of basic font-work. It’s colors have changed to reflect a balance of feelings I have witnessed in Andreea – both present and wished for. It went from soft, delicate and serious to bright, demanding and happy. The image in the header is processed from a lovingly taken photo I took of Andreea – though apparently some women thought it was a marketing image of femininity.

Feminitate was born as an after though on the heels of a similar website in Hebrew – at the time we were living in Israel. The Hebrew website got some traction but felt lifeless and unappreciated.  Then, out of nowhere, Andreea asked me to create a Romanian version. It started as a subdomain on the Hebrew website but soon after departed on it’s own path (the Hebrew website no longer exists).

Feminitate has less then 200 posts – most of which are written in a style I would describe as informative-accessible. It is meant to empower women by making information available to them when they need it. It does not offer entertainment or distraction. It is clear and focused.  It has never been marketed and never been promoted (SEO or otherwise).

Why has it been so successful?  I could probably formulate an intellectual answer like “it has a very specific niche in a very specific culture” and “it doesn’t have to compete to be overheard in the pollution of the English speaking Internet” and I may be right … but I think those are consequential side effects of something deeper.

Feminitate was created to cater to the needs of one person – Andreea and her need to express herself. It came as a surprise to the both of us because on the surface she had no connections to Romania, it’s culture, people or language (other then it being her mother tongue). Yet under the surface there was an intense movement … an awakening.

By catering to her own needs Andreea reached and touched other women … and together their momentum grew. The more ripples her writing had the more motivation she had to reach out and write more. Within a year Andreea was in a dialogue with Romanian speaking women (from Romania and around the world) and was receiving thankful emails regularly. She was also starting to give online consultations (by email, messenger, skype, etc.).

I remember a point in time where the site statistics indicated that a post about female anatomy had been viewed over 20,000 times (it is now nearing 40,000 views and there are over ten such “technical” posts that have been viewed more then 20,000 times and over 20 posts that have been viewed more then 10,000 times). What an amazing result … thousands of Romanian women are educating themselves simply by reading what Andreea had (literally) to write. I remember thinking to myself how powerful blogging can be … that no other medium has such an amazing and effective reach. How much effort would it have required to print 20,000 copies of that post and get it into the hands of 20,000 women?

However it wasn’t all smooth sailing. I don’t remember exactly  - but my impression is that for at least half of its online existence (3 years) the website continued to thrive without Andreea’s attention or involvement. Andreea lost her motivation to write or engage. We talked about it … a lot. Sometimes it felt to me as if she was failing to appreciate the value of her own work and as a result was also neglecting her responsibility to maintain it. Yet Andreea, being a woman, was not particularly moved by my motivational talks (it’s not that she doesn’t listen, she does) – she only wrote and only writes when she has a need to do so – when she feels connected.

Andreea’s second wave of writing was associated with her visit to Romania in the autumn of 2009. The response to Feminitate was so intense that we decided she should visit Romania and meet women in person. At the end of her 10 week visit I joined her for two weeks of vacation. 10 months later we had folded our life in Israel and were on a plane to Romania where we are in the process of creating a new life. We arrived in Romania with Andreea already a well known online figure. Now that online presence could begin to manifest in the physical world. I think it’s safe to say that almost all of her friends and social circles are a direct or indirect result of Feminitate.

I could not have imagined a better example of a website as an exploration and expression of purpose. Feminitate is an expression of Andreea’s Dharma – a website that has gone way beyond binary bits in a computer. Andreea is just now entering her 3rd wave of writing. I am excited to see what the future holds for us as we continue to explore this leg of our journey through life where Feminitate has been and continues to be a cornerstone.

Here it is directly from Google:

If you contact me and ask me about SEO I am most likely to reply by asking about your writing.

But the issue I want to address in this post is a wonderful example of what I consider to be misdirected decision making when UI decisions are in the hands of developers. WordPress 3.3 introduced a new media-upload interface. When you click on the new consolidated media upload button (there is now one where there used to be four – which is actually an excellent improvement) a new drag and drop surface onto which files can be dropped is displayed.

If you read about this feature inside the WordPress community then it will be hailed as a “cool” feature … and to developers or technically oriented users sitting in front of two screens it may be. However if you think about most users this “cool” feature is actually an obstacle.

For many (if not most) non-tech people “mouse drag & drop” is not an intuitive interaction – it is in a different league of difficulty compared to the simple “mouse click”. It is also fairly complicated to use when it involves more then one application window – which is why most people can drag & drop while playing solitaire but not much more.

I believe (no numbers or research to back this up so do with it what you will) that most people work with their browsers in either full screen or almost full screen mode (the latter mostly because they don’t know where to click  to get to full screen). Therefore the chance that they will have a screen containing a file browser and web browser side by side is very very slim. This means that for a lot of (if not most) people this will be a useless feature. Correction, it will be a distracting feature – standing in the way of something they already know, something they will have to figure out, something they will have to skip, EVERY time they want to upload media on their way back to the straightforward interface of “click & select”.

I am not one of those people. I am somewhere in the middle, I use drag and drop, I understand new interfaces fairly quickly. I work on one screen and my browser is full screen and I don’t expect to benefit from this feature. However this is not the end of the story – it isn’t just about what I like or like. There are further consequences in the two websites where I have upgraded to 3.3:

• In one site media uploading is dead – nothing works, neither the old nor the new. Since I upgraded I’ve been unable to upload images. I’ve gone over all the support suggestions I could find in the WordPress community and nothing helps. My personal support request, beyond an initial well intentioned response is hanging in the air silently and uselessly.
• In the other site the new drag & drop interface made a short appearance and I haven’t seen it again. Fortunately the older interface is still there and does work so I can still upload and publish images.

From searching the web I know that this feature has had other disturbing ripples, some of which have been solved.

I am confident that the WordPress developers in charge of this feature are proud of it as are their other colleague developers – I understand them, really, I’ve been in their shoes. But the introduction of this feature is a mistake – it sacrifices simplicity and core stability (uploading media is a very basic function) for a whim that very few people will benefit from.

How about getting that upgrade process to work instead of complicating things that already work?