Well, not the entire university, I guess, but a number of online publications use it. The newspaper is featured above, their CIO has a blog, and they’ve started a pilot with WPMU to offer blogging to everybody in the University.

Oobject’s galleries of abandoned pools, subway architecture, and revolting gold gadgets, among others, are all built in WordPress.

WordPress.com VIP hosts some high-traffic sites, including Gizmodo’s live coverage of the iPhone 3g introduction. Now that the NFL has selected the service for their blogging we’ll get a chance to see how they handle the Superbowl rush.

Michael Stephens is now using WordPress MU to host his classes online, and that opening page is really sweet. It’s hardly the first time somebody’s used a blog to host course content, but I like where he’s going with it. We’re significantly expanding our use of WordPress at Plymouth, and using it to replace WebCT/Blackboard is definitely an option. The biggest difference may be that course content in blogs is public, by default, but content in Blackboard is shared only with the members of the course. John Martin calls this “teaching out loud.” My opinion is a little more emphatic: “don’t do it in the dark.”

I wonder if Michael plans to keep content online after the classes run, or what he’ll do with old content if he runs the same course again in a later term. I think there’s a lot of value in leaving course content online and available to course participants long after the course is completed. I’ve been thinking the best way to make that work is to make each course (or section of a course) in each term its own blog. That way each instructor gets full control over their course environment, while still making it easy to preserve that content over time. Here’s the URL scheme I have in mind:

• http://courses.plymouth.edu/term_code/discipline_code/course_number/section

or, in practice, something like this:

• http://courses.plymouth.edu/200810/en/3510/02

It may not be pretty to have all those numbers, but it’s reliable, predictable, and extendable. The URL structure beyond that would be up to the instructor, and the subdirectories leading to the course blogs can automatically index their sub-content. My biggest question is about where to put the term code. I expect I’ll just have to play with it a while.

I hadn’t heard of Global Voices Online, a community generated global group news blog, until Jeremy Clarke spoke of it at WordCamp. And I didn’t think the site, with it’s do-good premise, worked until I actually explored it for a while. But, well, it’s a bit fascinating.

Global Voices grew out of a one-day conference in December 2004 at Harvard Law School which brought together bloggers from around the world to discuss ways in which the new medium could foment global dialogue at the grassroots level.

The notion is that volunteers and paid editors are scouring the blogosphere to find native voices around the world. And then these volunteers and editors summarize the news content among those bloggers and post the stories to Global Voices — in English. The aggregation is human driven because, they say, it leads to better results and the local knowledge of the the human aggregators allows them to spot news among new sources more quickly. The example case is personal-oriented bloggers who become front-line news reporters when news-worthy events strike home.

They’ve got funding from the Harvard Berkman Center, MacArthur Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and Reuters, and all their content is posted under a Creative Commons Attribution license. All this blogging stuff is interesting to the WordPress community here at WordCamp, but the fact that they’re also running it on WordPress allows Clarke to offer some specific tips: “use author profile pages to promote your authors,” “reuse, reuse, reuse code, reduction happens naturally,” and others. It turned out to be a better session than I expected.

In the “They Did This With WordPress” category (though from about a year ago, sorry) comes Truemors, a Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit clone from Guy Kawasaki.

Calling it a clone might be a backhanded non-compliment, but the truth is that it does a credible job in this increasingly crowded space*. And it’s built on WordPress.

The relevant plugins are WP-PostRatings and Share This. Electric Pulp did the design, and the whole thing apparently went live quickly on a tiny budget.

Anyway, add this to the growing list of sites using WordPress in some rather interesting ways.

* My real feeling is that all these sites could probably learn something from MetaFilter, where the inward facing parts are as important or more than the outward facing bits. Have you ever heard of a del.icio.us meetup? MetaFilter has them regularly.

All Things Digital is interesting. Parents would say My Baby Our Baby.com is a little more important. But Tibet Open Letter is as real as the violence.

Two things to note: all of them are based on WordPress, and those who discuss Tibet probably risk being listed by the Chinese government as a trouble maker.

Andy Peatling, who developed a WordPress MU-based social network and then released the code as BuddyPress has just joined Automattic, where they seem to have big plans for it. I’d been predicting something like this since Automattic acquired Gravatar:

It’s clear that the future is social. Connections are key. WordPress MU is a platform which has shown itself to be able to operate at Internet-scale and with BuddyPress we can make it friendlier. Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape.