Will WordPress help kill the newspaper industry?

WordPress just keeps getting better and better.

Now they are offering HD video streaming  capabilities for your wordpress blog or site via VideoPress.
They also have VideoPress available as an open source framework for large WordPress MU installs (check it out here). This will allow entrepreneurial publishers an own end to end HD video solution. There have been other solutions available for WordPress for a while, but I am excited to see a powerful video solution coming from the creators of WordPress.

The Revenue that can be created as a publishing platform with VideoPress and WordPress MU is huge for those big thinking entrepreneurs. WordPress is such a powerful platform with NO COSTS.

Now for a prediction…

With all the goodness coming from WordPress and the newspaper industry in the toilette, I believe that it’s only a matter of time that some young savvy entrepreneur will use the WPMU platform to create “Newspaper 2.0″ (a type of community news company for a digital generation) with the potential of rivaling a Ginette or McClatchy. Ultimately driving newspapers further into the grave.

Why do I believe WordPress will start replacing the traditional newspaper companies?

  1. Scalability – you can deploy infinite sites from one install (i.e. – sf.new-site.com, ny.news-site.com, etc.).
  2. Cost – Their are no costs for the technology, except for hosting or you hire designers/devs to do major customization (with all the amazing premium themes these days major customization can be greatly reduced).
  3. Automation – you can automate the author process and hire contributors from any city or country in the world.
  4. Features – It up to date with tech trends of our digital generation and almost any kind of plugin can be found for sms, twitter, digg, video, social this and that and so on…
  5. Time to market – with such a huge open source community of contributors you can deploy sites with all the features you could want within hours to days.
  6. Overall mindset – Those who would work with wordpress and develop savvy ideas with the technology tend to be young connected individuals vs. current conglomerate news companies who tend to be old school thinkers who struggle to understand todays pace of trends.
  7. I could continue with more examples, but thats all the time for today.

Did you like this post? Please click the TWEET button at the top of this post and SIGN-UP below to automatically receive my future blog posts by email.

Thanks for stopping by! ~ Devin Day

Great WordPress Tweaks and Optimizations

I have been a WordPress freak ever since my good friend and company co-founder Kendall Wouters introduced me to the power of WordPress. The things you can do with WordPress are amazing. And not just for blogging, but for building websites like JellyBarn and now powerful social networking sites with BuddyPress.

But alas, my point with this post is not to spout the greatness of WordPress, but to share some links to some helpful tips to optimize, secure, and tweak your WordPress site. I have found these extremely valuable for any and all my WP sites. Enjoy!

  1. 40 WordPress Optimisation tips
  2. 10 Killer WordPress Hacks
  3. 10 Steps To Protect The Admin Area In WordPress

WordPress Goodness: Slideshow Pro Integration

Today I took a few minutes to add Slideshow pro to my blog. I purchased the Slideshow pro flash viewer ($29.95) and the Slideshow pro director admin panel ($29.95) see screenshot below. I added a database and installed Slideshow pro Director on my server. I then uploaded some images and installed the Slidepress plug-in to my WordPress plug-ins directory. Finally I added the slideshow pro SWF file to the Slidepress plug directory and voila!!

Links:

 

director_screen1 

This is one integration that I highly recommend for beautifully displaying content on your wordpress site. If you would like to have something like this added to your blog and don’t know where to start, let me know via comments and I will get in touch.

(photos courtesy of my homeboy chemc)