March 31, 2005

Content Abuse

Andy reluctantly exposed a massive amount of search engine spam hosted by Wordpress. He saved a copy of the results before Google removed them.

March 24, 2005

RE: Thoughts on the Future of WP and MT

In response to Jeremy Zawodny's post:

I think that MovableType is currently in a better position in the blogging ecology than WordPress. MT's advantages are even greater when considering what could be the "next big thing": micro-data publishing (which Danny just mentioned).

Ultimately, though, I think that the market that MT and WP occupy is much larger than Jeremy implies. There is much more than "personal" vs. "corporate" blogging, or even "hosted" vs. "host it yourself" in this ecology.

It is a fact that WordPress is easier for web site operators to install and to maintain. What is the reason for this? To increase its appeal, MT could be ported to php. Looking at it a different way, SixApart could go as far as to serve as the database back-end for self-hosted MT instances. This would eliminate half of the complexity of installing, maintaining, and moving blogs.

Then there is the matter of resources. SixApart's acceptance of investment capital and its subsequent acquisition of Danga Interactive brings a lot of talent and technology to bear. Their solution domain can and will expand: TypeKey and memecached both demonstrate what this group can build, and LiveJournal demonstrates what this group can maintain.

The team behind WP may have to continue relying more than SixApart on an open source community to compete with MT. Meanwhile, companies such as Yahoo and Google, having financial and intellectual capital of their own, are starting to acquire and learn their way down. They are also taking advantage of open source development processes.

But is this really just a race between two blogging and data publishing platforms in a limited market? The big internet companies, all representing large-scale capitalizations of earlier forms of aggregation, are racing to serve the new problem domains that are exposed by blogging and the early semantic web. They want to own the wind of this phenomenon before companies such as SixApart do.

The real question is not whether MT will be relegated to a corner of the blogging ecology, but whether MT, WP, and other tools can bloom with blogging and the semantic web before their development teams are acquired (or out-learned) by larger companies.

With each new inflection point comes an opportunity for a group of developers to become the "Great American Company", so long as you aren't BK'd, acquired, or relegated to a small market along the way.

March 16, 2005

Semantic Micro-Content

Yahoo! 360° (previously known as Mingle) will apparently allow users to post brief assertions such as movie and music reviews. Will Yahoo! connect this data to the greater web?

By far - the most interesting features Mingle has - is it's support for various kinds of micro-content. This is something I've been predicting for a while now.

The natural way to delineate out and chop up all this end-user content - is to see it from a 'micro-content' POV. Notice this idea - as opposed to the burgeoning 'lower case semantic web' notion of microformats.

Micro-content is the notion that Reviews, Events, People, Lists, Media, etc. are what humans understand - and that many, many data silos have captured end-users content - to use it for themselves (Epinions comes to mind.) Source: Marc Canter

I can see some interesting features to add to MT and Wordpress!