WordPress
Technorati Bans WordPress Gurus
Oh Technorati, how far you have fallen. Once a darling of bloggers who valued their blogs based on its algorithm, the blog search engine has fallen further and further into irrelevance in the face of Google Blog Search. First they arbitrarily cripple their archiving, and now they manually ban two top WordPress gurus from its top 100: Matt Mullenweg and Alex King. Why, you ask? Simple: Matt and Alex make a lot of cool stuff that earns them links. Apparently, the people at Technorati don’t think contributing valuable software to the community warrants any acknowledgment.
WordPress is the gold standard in blogging software. Since Technorati’s a blog search engine, it’s basically shooting itself in the face twice over. Nice work, guys. You just made Google’s job even easier. Wonder if this is some sort of petty revenge on WordPress for replacing Technorati with Google Blog Search in its default dashboard. I, for one, am never using Technorati again. From now on, Google Blog Search is my only blog search engine.
Happy Fourth Birthday, WordPress!
How appropriate that the world’s leading blog software started out as a blog post four years ago today.
What to do? Well, Textpattern looks like everything I could ever want, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be licensed under something politically I could agree with. Fortunately, b2/cafelog is GPL, which means that I could use the existing codebase to create a fork, integrating all the cool stuff that Michel would be working on right now if only he was around. The work would never be lost, as if I fell of the face of the planet a year from now, whatever code I made would be free to the world, and if someone else wanted to pick it up they could. I’ve decided that this the course of action I’d like to go in, now all I need is a name. What should it do? Well, it would be nice to have the flexibility of MovableType, the parsing of TextPattern, the hackability of b2, and the ease of setup of Blogger. Someday, right?
Textpattern adopted a GPL in mid-2004, but it was too little, too late. Had it given itself to the world earlier, its code would’ve lived on in WordPress instead of fading into irrelevance. In a remix culture, generosity is the key to longevity.
(Via Mike Little.)
