WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg delivered his annual State of the Word (SOTW) address today from Tokyo Node Hall in Tokyo, Japan. This marks the second time the event was held outside North America, following last year’s address in Madrid, Spain.
This year’s event spanned three hours, with a special emphasis on Japanese culture. Matt explained, “We’ve gotten so much inspiration over the years from Japanese culture, we wanted to make this event really “of the space,” so we’re doing a few extra things this year. My presentation will include Mary Hubbard and Matías Ventura, but also part of it will be in Japanese and presented by Junko Fukui Nukaga. We’ll have a piano performance by Aiko Takei. After the presentation and Q&A we’ll do a panel in Japanese with Mieko Kawakami, Craig Mod, Hajime Ogushi, and Genki Taniguchi.”
Matt enumerated the WordPress contributions of the Japanese community, mainly Translation, and Wapuu. Japan was the country that made him realize that WordPress was more than a blogging tool, and Kansei engineering fascinates him.
A Japanese WordPress site was set up in December 2003, just six months after WordPress was launched. The version originally called “WordPress ME” (WordPress Multilingual Edition) was maintained by a user called Otsukare. Wapuu, the official mascot character of WordPress, was designed by Kazuko Kaneuchi in 2011 and is GPL licensed.
Matt then shared some statistics:
WordPress now powers 43.6% of the internet and, according to W3Techs, has a 62.3% CMS market share. WordPress powers 58.5% of all the websites in Japan and has an 83% market share, which is 31x Shopify, which is only at 2.7%. WordPress has surpassed 500M core downloads. English is the most used language (50.8%), followed by Spanish (6.87), German (5.99) and Japanese (5.82%) 1,700 new themes were uploaded in the last