Rhizome’s 7 on 7 event took place this weekend. I had the opportunity to work with Matt Mullenweg (creator of WordPress) on a 24 hour speed project. Together we implemented a series of opt-in interventions in the admin / Dashboard section of WordPress. The project is now live on all 12 million WordPress hosted blogs. You can activate it by clicking the “surprise me” option in your Personal Settings page.

For more information you can view Matt’s Surprise Me post on wordpress.com. Business Week and the New York Times also covered the event. Video of the presentation should be available shortly at rhizome.org.

The current “fun mode” features we have implemented include Humanized Statistics, 2X Publish and Sacred Acts of Publishing. More info on each listed below:

Humanized Statistics: A different way of thinking about your stats. The new “humanize” tab in the stats panel displays photos from towns with populations matching the current daily number of visitors to your blog.

2X Scale Publish Button: A small step towards making the publish button visually reflect its importance and power over other lesser buttons.

Sacred Acts of Publishing: Positive reinforcement for the often solitary act of publishing. Upon hitting the publish button, users may experience a video playback of backboard-shattering slam dunks, game show victories or epic slow claps. You may be alone in your bedroom at 3am when you finally hit the publish button, but that’s no reason not to receive a round of high fives and a chest bump:

This is an example of what you might see in your admin panel shortly after hitting the publish button:

And this is a dramatic reenactment of the user experience:

Big thanks to Rhizome for the invitation to take part in such an amazing event. And huge props to Matt, who was a pleasure to work with. Hopefully we’ll be rolling out some new “fun mode” features soon.

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