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The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack. Today's episode features a segment from part two of my interview with A List Apart co-founder Jeffrey Zeldman. Here, Jeffrey discusses the role WordPress and the open source movement can play in protecting privacy. Now, you can check out the entire interview over on our WP Minute Plus channel. Visit thewpminute.com for all the details.
Eric Karkovack (00:28)
⁓ What role can WordPress and open source play in keeping the open web alive and thriving and kind of keep pushing us forward on accessibility and standards and privacy, especially? That's another big one that we need to tackle.
Jeffrey Zeldman (00:45)
Privacy is huge.
Privacy is huge. And when you're working with AI, how do you guarantee privacy? If you're using an AI tool to say, look at every message I send all day long, look at every comp I make, read every article I publish, and tell me every day, what's the most important... After a week, tell me what patterns do you see in my work? How can I improve my work? That, to me, is an okay use of AI. ⁓
How do you give AI access to everything you do and make sure that it won't say, I hear you're in Queer-O-Matic. ⁓ When did you know you were queer? No, it's not supposed to do any of that, right? So ⁓ just as an example, ⁓ I think with AI now, I think one thing WordPress can do is say, all right, you're not allowed to scrape this site for content, period, or the owner of this site
will let you scrape this site for content, but you have to pay them a certain amount because they're losing advertising revenue or subscription revenue or whatever it is. So help to compensate the people we serve as we all deal with this huge change in the ecosystem. Similarly, WordPress can ⁓ say, right, you know.
Five years ago, if you had a coffee shop, you could make a WordPress website, but half the time, someone's going to type into ChatGBT or into Claude or whatever, ⁓ where's there a coffee shop near me? They should still be able to find your coffee shop. It should still be able to grab the information from your website. It should provide a link to your website, like, know, words won't do it, go look at the pictures. Basically, since we know...
that these huge companies are going to be grabbing and these huge new tools are going to be grabbing content without necessarily recompensing the people who create the content, the web will die. Five years of that and there'll be no new content left and then it'll just be bots scraping what bots wrote to serve to bots. it'll just be, so how can we continue to serve the human beings here?
whether they use AI or not, whether they like AI or not, how can we help them deal with this change that's coming at us from all sides? ⁓ I think that's a really important role that WordPress can play. don't know what... I know that the website of the future, which is something one of our advisors talks about, ⁓ I don't know that it's any different from the website of now.
but it's going to have to have underpinning to it under the surface that makes it more easy, that makes it easy not only for Google to find, but for all these bots to find. Like, how do I make sure that my content is getting to the agent that's going to book my client, that's going to book this user's airline tickets? And how do I still let them know that they should come to my website if they have a problem with the ticket or whatever?
⁓ so I think it's that negotiating the rift that AI is temporarily creating and hopefully only temporarily between creators and every, and the thing we want, which is come to my website and do a, you know, come to my website and do B come to my website, subscribe, check out my advertiser. Don't do any of that. I even, even if I have a free website, that's not monetized like zeltman.com. ⁓
I still want people to come to it. I still want you to read my words the way I laid them out, if at all possible. Yes, you can read them in RSS. Yes, you can read them any number of ways. Yes, you can have, you know, can read them scraped onto LinkedIn or whatever, but I also want you to come here because I like my new design and I want you to see it.
Eric Karkovack (04:42)
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