Great writeup (as usual) Jeff!

In my personal opinion, the WordPress community as a whole is not like other communities in that when someone does good work, others will promote it. I've never really looked at the other blogs in our niche as competition, and so I've always tried to either feature good work others do, or at least work a link into a post to help them out. Others have done the same for WPHacks and it has really helped the site grow. In most niches, people act like their competition doesn't even exist!

The one area where you'd think the community thing wouldn't apply is with the premium theme designers, but they even help each other out and run ideas off each others (at least the top few do). That is the great thing about the WordPress community and I think Matt is a big reason why. He's very passionate and his mindset has rubbed off on the community.

On a side note, it is funny you mention WPCandy and WPHacks working together, as I remember Michael and I once discussed collaborating on a WordPress ebook. I honestly don't remember why it never happened, but I remember discussing it a few years ago. I ended up writing and releasing one on my own a couple months later.