Okay people, I just read some really big news in the web world – WordPress just passed a huge milestone – it now has 50,000,000 blogs on the web. Half are self-hosted (including mine). That means 50 million websites on the World Wide Web are built on the same platform or with the same ingredients. According to an article I read in
Adweekthat’s approximately 14% of all the sites on the web. You can read the full announcement in Adweek.

What’s In It For You?

What does this mean for the average person (small biz owner, careerist, job searcher, medium size biz owner and even large, consultant, non-profit executive director, fundraiser, etc…)? It means that WordPress is really popular and therefore, a powerful content management system (a tool for you to house and manage your content on the web). It’s fairly easy to maintain and it definitely empowers the site’s owner. It also means that this platform has made it easier and cheaper to build your online home or headquarters and to build your brand online.

Here’s an interview with Matt Mullenweg, creator and founder of WordPress fromMeme Burn.

The YOU Start-Up

In an unrelated article in the New York Times yesterday, Thomas L. Friedman wrote on op-ed entitled, The Start-Up of You. In his article Friedman talks about our economy, the glum unemployment figures and the optimistic job market. Yes, that’s right, optimistic job market.

It’s optimistic because we now have the ability to create jobs, careers and companies. We’re living in innovative times and those who can think critically, predict and make trends, are comfortable with risk and can adapt will be highly successful.

Living in Optimism

Depending on how you look at it, this is really an empowering time we live in and the web has truly leveled the playing field. With very little money someone can start a company, build a team, grow a business and on and on….but, you need some imagination, tenacity, persistence and a unique value proposition in order to stand out from the herd.

Tools like WordPress, Facebook and Twitter give us incredible marketing power for very little money. To use Facebook and Twitter is free – it’s just time consuming ­­– and to host a website can cost as little as $5 and change per month. These tools also give us the ability to network with people that it used to be difficult to have direct access to – venture capitalists, CEO’s, founders of other successful companies around the world, celebrities and the media.

My favorite section of the article is something that Reid Garrett Hoffman, LinkedIn founder, said.

“To begin with that means ditching a grand life plan. Entrepreneurs don’t write a 100-page business plan and execute it one time; they’re always experimenting and adapting based on what they learn.

It also means using your network to pull in information and intelligence about where the growth opportunities are — and then investing in yourself to build skills that will allow you to take advantage of those opportunities. You can’t just say, ‘I have a college degree, I have a right to a job, now someone else should figure out how to hire and train me.’ You have to know which industries are working and what is happening inside them and then find a way to add value in a way no one else can. For entrepreneurs it’s differentiate or die — that now goes for all of us.”

What are you doing to differentiate yourself? How are you staying ahead of the curve? How are you going to get noticed on the web? In a future post I’m going to share some of my favorite personality laden sites and tips on how to get noticed online so stay tuned.