 Back at New Media Expo, I'm with Joey Kudich from WordPress.com. How are you doing today? Good. How are you? We're having a blast here. I'm familiar with WordPress.org and WordPress.com, but I'm guessing that my audience doesn't know the difference. I'd like to talk to you about why I'm standing in the Happiness Bar for WordPress.com. Sure. The Happiness Bar comes from the title of our support team at WordPress.com, which are happiness engineers. We do a lot of these events and conferences. We drew inspiration from the Genius Bar from Apple and decided to call it the Happiness Bar. I like it. I like it. What is WordPress.com? There's two versions for WordPress. One is self-hosted, meaning anyone can install it, download it, and run it on their own hosting situation. That's where podfeed.com is run on WordPress.org is where I downloaded WordPress, but this is different. WordPress.com is the commercial, hosted version of WordPress where you just sign up and everything is managed for you. There are a few restrictions around that, of course, meaning you can't install your own plugins, but on the plus side, you get a bunch of functionality built-in without having to manage it yourself. Every week, a couple of weeks on my show, Barpooshot tells me, oh, there's a new version of WordPress. It's a security update. You've got to go load it. Hey, check your plugins. This plugin had a vulnerability. You've got to go fix that, Allison. I wouldn't have to worry about that if I had it hosted with you. Correct. At WordPress.com, we take care of all of that for you, so you never have to worry about updates or doing any of that management on your own. Let's say I've just got a yearning to start a blog about the left-handed screwdrivers, and I want to host it at WordPress.com. What do I do? You go to WordPress.com and press the big sign-up button and follow the prompts until you're ready to blog. What kind of things do I ... What does it cost, let's say? It's free to start. You will get a URL that's like mylefthandedblog.wordpress.com. If you want to purchase your own domain name, that's $18 a year. Then there's also other upgrades, such as custom design. You can purchase premium themes. We also have a few bundles which will include some of those things all in one package. Okay. I've got a hankering to do this blog. I've pressed the button. I've got a blog. Do I get to choose themes in that sort of thing? Yes. There's a few hundred themes that you can choose for free, and then a few hundred more that are premium themes that you can purchase from. A few hundred? That's pretty good. Yes. It's pretty good. What about in terms of plugins? How many plugins do you have that I can install through you? There's no UI where you go and activate certain plugins. Everything's built-in already for you. There's a lot of functionality that you don't get by default on WordPress.org if you were self-hosted. That includes publicize, which is publishing directly from WordPress to, say, Facebook, Twitter, all your social networks. That's built-in? That's built-in, yes. Then a bunch of other functionality that you wouldn't get normally out of the box with WordPress. What about podcasting? We do have some podcasting features. It's probably not as advanced as you could get with a self-hosted podcasting plugin, but we do support podcasting. We do support embedding audio and things like that. Let's say I start at WordPress.com and I've got my left-handed screwdrivers.wordpress.com. At a later time, I can upgrade it and say, I want my own domain because now I'm becoming famous and I want to have my own brand, so I can do that. Then I could also go into these more premium themes to help my game and that sort of thing. What if I want to then start hosting on my own? Is there a way to escape? Absolutely. We'd never lock you into anything, so there's an export button that'll generate a file that you can then import very easily into any other WordPress installation. If you decide you really like some of the features from WordPress.com, we do have a plugin for WordPress.org for self-hosted installations called Jetpack. Oh, I've actually used Jetpack. I've got Jetpack for metrics and that sort of thing. Yeah, so Jetpack includes statistics. It includes that publicized feature that I was talking about. I didn't even know I had that. I should go check that out. Jetpack is basically a plugin with about 20-ish modules that you can then select which ones you want to run. And those are all features that exist on WordPress.com that we bring to other WordPress installations that are not running on our service. So I love the idea of WordPress.com because it makes it so easy for somebody to start. They don't have to spend any money. They can get a web presence, get their feet wet. If they want to leave, they can. Having that cage door open where we can fly out if we need to, but that probably keeps more customers in. Yeah, absolutely. The idea is that we want to democratize publishing and our mission is to make it as easy as possible. So by not locking people in, we enable that. That's fantastic. Not letting people move in and out of our system. Whether you can export to another WordPress blog or you could export to Squarespace or any other service, we kind of welcome people coming in and coming out. That's fantastic. I have actually used WordPress.com for a friend of mine. I set up a website with form and said, okay, you've got it now. Now I'm not going to help anymore. That's a nice way to help other people get started without having to maintain them forever. So thank you very much, Joey. Really appreciate your time. And again, it's WordPress.com. That's right. Thank you so much for stopping by.