I’ll be attending the 2 day SMX Social Media New York event this Tuesday and Wednesday. You can still register here, although it will be more expensive at the door (use promo code SMX10offSM for a 10% discount).

I’m also pleased to be going to a charity event tonight from 7pm-10pm, being hosted by the Internet Marketers of New York to benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma society. Marty from the Aimclear Blog tagged me on this event so say a little about my experience with Lymphoma. I really didn’t feel comfortable writing about this, since my mother had 2 very serious bouts with cancer over the past 10 years. Thankfully, all is well now.

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Here with me is Dan Milward, CEO of Instinct Entertainment LTD – makers of the E-Commerce plugin for Wordpress. Thank you for taking the time.

1 – What made you decide to go out and write an E-Commerce plugin for Wordpress?

Years ago I wrote a WordPress wish list on my blog. One of those wishes was for a Shopping Cart plugin - months later when a client asked me to build them a shopping cart application for WordPress I positively jumped at the opportunity. The only other option at the time was EzStatic Micro Shop and that was not a plugin - i.e. too hard for me.

2 – There are lots of good Wordpress themes out there, but I haven’t seen a lot of them that are geared for E-Commerce sites specifically. What is your favorite Wordpress template for E-Commerce?

At present K2 because it is easy to use - even then though it has its quirks and a lot of my developers find it difficult to customize I still like it because it is quite powerful as far as themes go - especially when coupled with the modules plugin (which extends the widgets functionality).

I think the simpler the theme the better - people want to be able to customize their sites as much as possible which is why it makes sense for us to make as many widgets and tag includes for WP e-Commerce as possible.

Back to the point though. I don’t think that there are any really good themes designed specifically with e-Commerce in mind. This is something we have recognized and it is something we’re working on - we’re especially excited about the next generation of DropShop that we are working on with Nick La from n design studio - here is a sneak preview:

3 – Looks like you guys have been rolling out some nice new features (for those of you that haven’t tried out the drag and drop shopping module, try it out here). Care to tell the audience about any upcoming features?

Well if you like the live search feature in the Apple.com website then you’ll like the new enhanced search form coming soon. DropShop is about to get another visual overhaul, product tags are on the way in, product zooming is being planned, and future versions will be heavily optimized and we know that the next version of WP e-Commerce will load more then 70% faster then before.

4 – Are you taking appropriate steps are to make sure that your E-Commerce system is SEO ready?

Of course. This is very important to us and we have already integrated WordPress Permalinks with WP e-Commerce to make URLs more human readable and search engine friendly - plus we are about to release the new product tags feature.

I’m not sure if this is the right place to mention it but the ’share this’ social networking feature is also integrated with WP e-Commerce and we have RSS feeds for all products and product categories.

5 – I’m under the impression that blogs are overtaking the web by force. They are indexed by search engines faster, can be a news authority, have most all of the features that a content management system (CMS) has, and now they also have the ability to do E-Commerce. How to you envision the future of blogging?

Funnily enough I was thinking about this today.

You see I use WordPress for everything, there is not much that it can’t do (and if you can think of something it can’t do then I’m sure you can make a plugin to make it do it) and so it struck me that I haven’t refereed to or even thought of WordPress as an actual “blogging tool” in years - so although you are right in that blogs are taking the web by force (I think that they always have been) I think that in some funny way the word blog is becoming synonymous with the word website. Strange huh…

But you asked about the future of blogs not WordPress. Blogs are here to stay. It is as simple as that.

Here’s a thought. When I was studying New Media one of our tutors told us that the porn industry drove website design and technology I think that now possibly it is blogs and blog developers that are changing the face of the internet. We are the new driving force…

6 – Since your E-Commerce software is a plugin, are there things that you think you will never want it to do as compared with a full scale E-Commerce system?

WP e-Commerce is becoming more and more full scaled all the time - we have OS Commerce, Zen Cart users, and e-Junkie users migrating to us all the time. I think this is because the first two pieces of software are legacy (old school) and e-Junkie users would prefer an all in one WordPress experience.

To be totally honest I believe that the only missing features in WP e-Commerce that would stop it from being called a “full scalle” solution would be UPS / Fedex shipping integration. And these are in the planning stages now. In fact if there are any readers reading this now who have experience integrating UPS etc that would care to lend a hand we would love to hear from you!

However I also think that for the average e-commerce user this does not matter - especially if you are in the business of digital downloads then it does not matter at all.

[Editors note:  more product info for the E-Commerce Plugin can be found on Instinct's Wiki located here.]

Yesterday, NowSourcing hit the Digg homepage with this post on the difference in negative remarks on StumbleUpon and Digg for about 2 hours. I quickly found that the blog wasn’t ready for the traffic spike. (for those Diggers reading this, here’s your chance to complain with your lame, fail, old news babblings) :).

Here is a list of some good lessons learned the next time you find your blog in a similar predicament:

1 - Install and configure the WP-Cache plugin (For Wordpress Blogs). WP-Cache is a brilliant plugin that keeps most of your stuff that will load in a static file rather than loading and compiling the PHP on every page request. For the more tech savvy, feel free to tweak to your heart’s content:

h/t to Lyndon for making me think about WP-Cache.
2 - If your site does go down, check out data on all the mirror sites. One such site is Duggtrends. For those of you not familiar with Duggtrends, it’s a great service that people can link to so that the story can still stay alive, and also has some pretty nifty traffic graphs showing before and after your site went hot:

Another great site is Duggback. They aggregate all of the places that your site would have been cached such as Google, Dotcache, and the WaybackMachine. Here is what my story looked like on Duggback. Something else pretty cool that I did was put up a mirror on my wordpress hosted blog. This at least saved some RSS readers, which went up over 60% in one day, an impressive showing.

3 - Tweak your server. This runs on a Linux box, and I did some performance tuning. Won’t bore you with tech details, but there are fewer services running and I also added more RAM to the box. You might want to just go ahead and get a reliable dedicated server if you’re serious about traffic.

4 - Didn’t make the Digg homepage this time? Don’t feel bad. Most sites never do. Something that may help push you over the top next time around is use of the new shout feature (here’s some helpful info on how to use, also an overview on the new Digg features). But please, be kind and only use sparingly: it may cause Diggers to want to reach through the computer screen and strangle you

Surely, if you have ever posted anything to Digg that didn’t make the front page, you’ve been hit with comments such as lame, fail, old news, or something like that.

I’ve found that StumbleUpon has some interesting folks that expand quite a bit on their negative opinions. Take my recent post about the 16 personality types of StumbleUpon users. It was generally very well liked (23 reviews, 20 of which were positive), but if you take a look at the thumbs down reviews, you’ll find things like this one from TravisKab:

It’s nice to be able to sit back and laugh about this. Just so you all know, I really don’t feel compelled to pigeonhole myself as a personality type and frolic (spelling?) in traffic. But, I do like to take notice of interesting patterns in social media and spread the word about them. And strong opinions one way or the other make life far more interesting than zombies saying “nice post,” “lame,” or “I don’t like it”. By all means, keep the discussion going.

And hey, people that post positive reviews are also pretty verbose. Take this one from TheNanny612 for instance:

I do see the point of the couple of thumbs down reviews on the 16 personalities post. People were expecting a more thorough analysis of StumbleUpon users and felt that the Myers Briggs test was not substantial / accurate enough to be based upon. To this, I respond that this is a social media blog, not a psychology lab

Hey, if you want to do some grant writing, we put some stumblers in a sensory deprivation chamber for a while and see how they do. It’s still pretty good that StumbleUpon even has a spot for personality type unlike most social media stuff that is out there.

Here’s a different angle of looking at social media entirely - by personality type. In case you missed it, when you are filling out your profile in StumbleUpon, you can put what personality type you are. Using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), there are 16 possibilities a person can be. There are lots of sites that have sample tests online, but here is the official foundation continuing the original work.

So, I’ve taken a sampling of top stumblers, social media mavens/addicts, and people I just plain find interesting. Here is what I found (personality type definitions credit - personalitypage.com):

The (E)xtroverts:

ENTP - The Visionaries (we’re the best, by the way )
nowsourcing
etcetera (top stumbler)
tnash

ENFJ - The Givers
barbarakb
noey

ENTJ - The Executives
waynesmallman

ESTP - The Doers
khook20

The (I)ntroverts:

INFP - The Idealists
gladius
vladtheaffiliate

ISTJ - The Duty Fullfillers
avigle
rustybrick

INTP - The Thinkers
bartthebear
flyingrose

INFJ - The Protectors
caile-girl (top stumbler)

If you haven’t put in your personality type in StumbleUpon yet, you’re missing out. This is an interesting item that tells more about you than that your interests include the Internet and computers