Adii Pienaar

There's been a lot said lately about us replicating the Dot Com bubble all over again and even though a much-respected figure like Paul Graham has stated his believe that we're not in a bubble, the doubts remain.

I'm yet unconvinced by either to be honest; I understand all the reasons why people wouldn't think we're in a bubble, yet I'm very cautious about some of the valuations being thrown around in what may just be a very ambitious funding environment at present.

When all else fails though, fall back on what we know: years and years of data. The above-linked article highlights that (listed) tech companies at present trades on similar ratio's to other non-tech companies, which at least seems to indicate that people outside of the supposed bubble isn't throwing their money at it (which is what I understand happened in Dot Com).

What do you think about the bubble?

I've used a couple of CMS platforms in my life and I think that they are all great in their own way. Heck, I've even tried to build a business supporting multiple platforms.

I believe that the platform doesn't really matter and that every user should pick not the most popular platform, but the one that they feel most comfortable with and suits their needs best. Simple.

For my own projects... I'm happy to consider any platform as long as it's WordPress. :)

As most of you know, I made the switch from WordPress to Tumblr and then back to WordPress last year. The second migration back to WordPress being a relatively painful & manual-date-entry experience. If I had waited a couple of months, that would've been so much easier...

WooThemes launched our brand new Tumblr2WP tool last week, which basically exports any Tumblr account to WordPress and makes it immediately compatible with WooThemes' tumblog themes, as well as Express.app. Sweet. Heck, we even made it onto Mashable.

With more than 250 Tumblr accounts already exported since launch on Friday, I'd think that there's quite a few people that wants to marry the flexibility of WP with the awesome publishing experience that Tumblr has popularized in the last year or so. And this is exactly what we've been trying to create and enable at WooThemes: we wanted to replicate as much of the great functionality that has made Tumblr popular on our preferred platform (WordPress) and then give you the opportunity to decide which of these platforms you wanted to use.

If you haven't yet and have a Tumblr blog at present, have a look at the new tool and consider a switch...

Something really cool has happened recently with regards to the contributors for Aboard Entrepreneurship: it has gone somewhat viral. :)

A couple of the new contributors that has joined up in the last week, has taken the individual initiative to introduce us to some more awesome entrepreneurs and had recommended that they get involved with the project. As you can imagine it is pretty hard getting the attention of well-known people (like all of our contributors) as e-mail overload is a real issue for most of us, which is why these viral introductions & recommendations have been amazing!

Here's the 4 new contributors:

• Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
• Roy Rodenstein, Going.com
• Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Hacker
• Gabe Weinberg, DuckDuckGo

We're very close to having 1000 people signed up to the mailing list at this stage. Head on over to the site and sign up to be notified of the next phase of the project which will be launching soon.

I just watched this video and I quite enjoyed some of the insight that went into the creation of Tumblr and kudo's to David for not doing the cliche thing which is to knock other tools; instead he believes in a "horses for courses" mentality whereby Tumblr is used for certain reasons, whilst other people still prefer WP (or others) for other reasons.

Having myself been through various ups & downs in terms of blogging and content-creation over the last 4 years, I can attest to everything David said in the little interview. Heck, this even saw me move to Tumblr, which was quite a significant thing considering I'm co-founder of one of the biggest WordPress companies on the web.

Since then I have however been able to move back to WordPress (powered by Woo of course) and I now have 90% of the functionality I had with Tumblr, plus the added benefit of not battling Tumbeasts and owning my own data.

Hopefully within the next day or two, WooThemes will be able to release a little something that too will give you Tumblr-like functionality on your own, hosted WordPress-powered platform.