January 2008

Second place isn’t so bad with numbers like these. Here are some numbers about blogging and social networking sites according to Nielsen Online. They just released November’s numbers on the top 10 social networking sites. The biggest gainers are Flixster and LinkedIn, a social network for professionals.

Movable Type announced that its software is now open source. With a number of killer features built in and a thriving developer community, the organization may be well positioned to woo users from WordPress.

Since Movable Type’s launch, there has always been a free version available with fewer features than the commercialized product. According to the Movable Type’s blog, “back in late 2002 and early 2003, Ben and Mena had both been adamant about one particular point from the very beginning of the negotiations: That there would always be a free version of Movable Type with the source code freely available.”

In Scott Karp’s overall discussion asking whether blogs can do journalism–I think it’s all the same and chances are techies don’t care anyway–he touches on blogs partially being a function of their Web-native content management systems. Blogs, often delivered via WordPress, have built-in advantages over content management systems such as RSS feeds, comments, trackbacks and inline links. And when it comes to ease of use, a blog platform beats or average CMS hands down. So why have I been stuck with so many clunky CMS systems over the years? There’s a host of reasons, but most of these afflictions come from strange IT management practices.

There’s a good discussion on the line between journalism and blogging, but it’s also worth noting the technology gulf between media companies and their content minions.

If you don’t have a lot of time to follow WordPress development news, just read to this one blog – WordPress weekly digest. One short post per week, with a summary list of what changes went into trunk!


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