Sebastiaan van der Lans - On WordPress, Blockchain, Timestamps & Trust

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3-minute WordProof Pitch at European Commission’s ‘Blockchains for Social Good’ 🇪🇺

WordProof is one of the 23 finalists selected out of the 178 applications received for the 5 x €1.000.000 EIC Horizon Prize on ‘Blockchains for Social Good’. Monday, February 10th, was Finalists’ Day. 23 initiatives gave a pitch and demo. Here’s the full transcript of WordProof’s pitch, presenting the impact of our solutions on social good aspects and the underlying economic model.

Unleashing the Power of Private AI Models: Transforming Publisher’s Content Archive into an SEO Goldmine

Publishers are constantly seeking innovative ways to optimize their content and improve their search engine rankings. Private AI models offer a groundbreaking solution that can revolutionize the publishing industry. By training AI models on their own data, publishers can unlock the power of personalization, streamline content creation, and maximize SEO and structured data opportunities. In this blog, I’ll explore how private AI models can turn a publisher’s content archive into a valuable SEO goldmine

Personalization and Streamlined Content Creation

Private AI models enable publishers to create personalized drafts and content suggestions that align perfectly with their brand identity. By analyzing historical data, these models capture the publisher’s unique tone of voice and historical patterns. This level of personalization streamlines content creation saves time, and ensures consistency and authenticity across all published content.

SEO and Structured Data Optimization

When combined with deeply structured data, private AI models have the potential to transform a publisher’s SEO strategy. By integrating timestamps and provenance technology, publishers can enhance search engine visibility, improve Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) signals, and drive organic traffic growth. Timestamping content establishes credibility and signals freshness, while provenance technology provides transparent data about the origin and history of content.

Expertise and Collaboration

As experts in the SEO, policy, provenance and content spaces, we are uniquely positioned to drive the success of publishers leveraging private AI models. Our team’s extensive experience in developing tools, coupled with our expertise in timestamps and provenance technology, ensures that publishers receive the best possible guidance and results. We understand the industry’s best practices and search engine guidelines to help publishers maximize their SEO benefits.

Collaboration Opportunities

We are excited to collaborate with forward-thinking publishers on implementing private AI models to unlock the full potential of their content archives. This transformative solution offers the opportunity to boost SEO, enhance E-A-T signals, and establish publishers as authoritative sources of information. Join us in harnessing the power of private AI models to drive SEO growth and revolutionize the publishing industry.

Conclusion

Private AI models present an exceptional opportunity for publishers to optimize their content archives and boost their SEO performance. By leveraging personalization, streamlining content creation, and integrating timestamps and provenance technology, publishers can turn their archives into valuable SEO goldmines. With our expertise and collaborative approach, we are ready to empower publishers to achieve unprecedented SEO success and elevate their online presence.

Contact us today to explore how private AI models can transform your content archive into an SEO goldmine. Together, we can revolutionize your publishing strategy and drive sustainable growth.

Keynote: Blockchain & Media

DUBLIN, October 28th, 2020 – I was invited to deliver a keynote on Blockchain & Media on behalf of WordProof. Here you’ll find the slides with links to all resources mentioned as many elements in the slides are clickable.

Blockchain & New Media: Building a Trusted Web with blockchain Timestamps from Bas van der Lans

If you find the presentation helpful or relevant to what you work on, feel free to connect!

Connect on LinkedIn
Follow WordProof and me on Twitter
Get Started with WordProof by watching a demo or right away via WordPress

Furthermore, here’s a recent interview on Media and Blockchain at the Dutch Media Week together with Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast SEO, 11 million sites use their tools), Vincent Everts, and the creative director of a leading Dutch media outlet.

Here’s an article, based on this interview: Will Europe Lead the ‘Trusted Web’ after GDPR?

Will Europe Lead the ‘Trusted Web’ after GDPR?

A truthful internet makes a trustworthy society. That’s what we firmly believe at WordProof, and as winners of Europe’s Blockchains for Social good, I dare to say that our visions align: we need a better internet for all citizens. Europe has a reputation for fighting for a better internet, hence GDPR. This article focuses on what policymakers could do to lead the way towards a ‘Trusted Web’. TLDR; there’s a massive opportunity for policymakers today!

Even though the internet has brought us many good things, it has a deep-rooted issue: trust. On the internet, citizens suffer fraud, manipulation, and theft on a daily basis. Policymakers can play a role in guiding the world towards a trustworthy internet. That’s what Europe tried to do with GDPR, and that’s what organizations like Europe’s NGI – Next Generation Internet – work on every day.

English subs available! How to improve the internet, SEO & combat fake news through policy? With Vincent Everts and Joost de Valk.

How to win € 1 million? 8 tips for winning prizes to grow your start-up 🏆

Frank van Dalen and team WordProof: Jelle, Marijn and myself, Sebastiaan

Today, WordProof officially received the € 1 million prize as the winner of Europe’s Blockchain for Social Good competition. “How did WordProof win that € 1 million from the European Commission?” is a question we frequently get, as winning prizes is an interesting alternative (or addition) to searching for investors as it doesn’t cost you equity. I sat down with Frank van Dalen, who was the initiator of WordProof’s submission, to share our lessons learned about winning prizes to finance and grow your start-up!

Frank van Dalen, WordProof.
📷 Nicky Otten.

Frank started as WordProof‘s angel investor and is actively involved in the company. He has a very (!) rich track record in both entrepreneurship as in politics. We took the time to write down our lessons learned, based on Frank’s track record and our collaboration as a team at WordProof over the last 15 months.

Although a prize is not the same as a subsidy or funding application, there are also many similarities. In this blog, 8 insights are shared that enabled WordProof to keep 175 other blockchain companies behind in Europe’s Blockchains for Social Good competition.

Why WordPress Will Empower Half of the Web Soon

In the last decade, WordPress’s market share grew from a little over ten percent to over one-third of the web. This makes it the most used Content Management System (CMS) by a large margin. Can WordPress still grow, and where will that growth come from? Is WordPress your best bet as a CMS? Here’s why I firmly believe that WordPress will cross the magic 50% market share mark before the end of this decade while being the best choice for individuals, businesses and enterprises!

At the time of writing (June 2020), WordPress’s market share is at a staggering 37.3%. At the start of 2011, its market share was 13,1%, so it reached an average growth of 2.47% per year.

If WordPress continues at this rate, we’ll end up with over 60% market share on January 1st, 2030 (hitting 50% at the end of 2025). However, as WordPress is already used by so many websites, where will those new users come from and why will WordPress be interesting to them?

“In the coming years, 3 billion new people will be connected to the internet. WordPress is free to use and translated into over 50 languages. As translations are a community effort, they don’t need to make sense from a business perspective.” said WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg in this 2017 interview.

I agree that this will be a logical driver for adoption from a macro perspective. However, I will look at it from an enterprise perspective, presenting you five drivers that will fuel further WordPress adoption this decade:

After exploring these drivers, you might agree that just half of the web at the end of this decade, or even by 2025 is a conservative estimate. Joost de Valk, the founder of Yoast SEO, made a bold guess: “WordPress has reached critical mass in multiple ways and is on its way to 50%, maybe even within the next two years”.

Highlights from A Conversation with Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp Europe 2020

One of the many highlights of WordCamp Europe 2020, the biggest online WordPress event in history was the conversation with Matt Mullenweg on the future of WordPress. Firstly he and Matías Ventura looked at upcoming features for Gutenberg, WordPress’s revolutionary new editor. Some of those will be shipped around August, in WordPress 5.5. After that, they did a 40-minutes Q&A. I cherry-picked some of the many highlights and transcribed those insights for you.

How to Sell WordPress to Anyone?

Ever needed to convince someone of choosing WordPress? And Why is WordPress so popular anyway? Recently I wrote an article explaining why WordPress’s market share will soon cross the magical 50% mark. From that article, I extracted five compelling arguments to convince anyone of choosing WordPress as a CMS:

WordPress is not just a Blog! Enterprises use it too
Is WordPress a tool for blogs and small businesses? Yes, it is! But it’s not just for them. 2,645 of the top 10,000 sites on the web are built with WordPress. There’s a reason why TED, News Corp, Disney, New York Post, and many more are using it. If you think of WordPress as a toy for amateurs which is not suitable for B2B or enterprise, you should probably reconsider.
Explain the WordPress Ecosystem: its economics, technology, and community
Often, open-source communities and software have the reputation of being slow-evolving, insecure, and not enterprise-ready. WordPress is different. We matured massively on three important aspects: technology, finance, and community.
Structure Matters and WordPress’s new editor outputs perfectly structured content
In 2016, WordPress started to fully redesign its editor, called Gutenberg. The idea of Gutenberg is that every component will be modular until everything is a block, and blocks are structure! To stay the dominant search engine, Google needs robust structured markup on every single website. Due to its modular nature, Gutenberg is the perfect fundament for WordPress to benefit from the changing marketing dynamics on the internet.
Google loves WordPress (more than any other CMS)
It’s in Google’s benefit to create a level playing field where every small business can win. Google realized that they can only fix the web if they work on the underlying technologies that power those websites, which is why they are now deeply invested in the WordPress community. By just updating your WordPress plugins, your website also gets better over time. It automatically adopts these new features. This fact alone makes the business case for using WordPress no brainer, albeit only for the content part.
WordPress wins massive market share in e-Commerce too
With the support for Magento M1 ending, and the acquisition of the Open-source Magento by Adobe, Magento’s market share is decreasing rapidly. This creates space for other solutions to grow and WooCommerce is positioned well to fill this gap.

Be Safe, Be Healthy, Stay Happy, Stay Productive

These are crazy times. Yesterday I stumbled upon this motivational speech by Ryan Serhant which resonated a lot with me. He’s a New York-based real estate broker his first day in this business on the day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. September 15, 2008. For all entrepreneurs out there; here’s Ryan’s powerful metaphor, on how to swim in the storm like a professional swimmer!

“I know, I am at the office, I’m at work, I’m not supposed to be here. There are executive orders … I am supposed to be at home … quarantine.” says Ryan, “But listen … I’m the captain of a very large ship. People look to me … people depend on me. These are unlike any times out there”.

In this article I transcripted the very powerful metaphor he used in this video. Here you have it.

How Blockchain started in 1991: With Timestamping Digital Documents!

Stuart Haber, one of the two inventors of the blockchain, tells the story of the technology, explaining how it works and describing applications that decentralize maintenance of the integrity of digital records. What started as a solution for a time-stamping problem developed into something that is already transforming entire industries.

Here’s the Whitepaper he describes in his talk.

The Longest Running Blockchain Started in 1995

Here’s Stuart Haber, showing the backside of the NY Times. On a weekly base, they published the unique fingerprint of the recent state of Surety‘s chain.

About Stuart Haber

Dr. Haber serves as Chief Scientist for Auditchain. As a young cryptographer at Bellcore (Bell Communications Research), in 1990 Dr. Haber co-invented the blockchain technique for ensuring the integrity of digital records. He was cofounder with Scott Stornetta of Surety, which was spun off from Bellcore in 1993. Surety offers digital time-stamping services and is the first commercial deployment of a blockchain. Dr. Haber’s work in cryptographic time-stamping was later adopted by Satoshi Nakamoto as the basic mechanism for data integrity in Bitcoin.

Source of this bio.

Here you see the last page of Bitcoin’s whitepaper, referring to Stuart Haber’s work:

Speaking at WordCamp Miami: From WordPress to Blockchain, The Future is 100% Open Source!

At the end of February, the WordPress community gathers in Miami for WordCamp Miami. For WordProof, it will be the first time we physically present our solution in the United States, as I’ll be speaking at this wonderful conference. The main topic will be how WordPress and blockchain can lead to a more trustworthy internet.

The event was held at Florida’s International University. Here’s the video of my talk:

How would you compete with a CMS with tens of millions of users, and tens of thousands of contributors like #WordPress?
You simply CAN’T!
Sebastiaan van der Lans, founder WordProof.io