As Nick Wilson writes on the Performancing blog: ‘Wow, what a start to the year‘. Let me try and get this in some kind of order:

• Performancing announce their metrics package in unsustainable and needs a buyer
• PayPerPost steps in to buy the package and the Performancing website, there is blogosphere uproar
• The Performancing editor is rebranded as ScribeFire
• PayPerPost drop out of the purchase, and the metrics package will be released to open source
• Nick Wilson resigns from Performancing and is replaced by Chris Garrett
• Chris announces that Performancing’s ad network will close, to much bafflement
• Two days later, Garrett is gone and Wilson apparently back!

It sure has been a crazy time, and Performancing has almost been like a mini blogosphere soap opera. I’m sure the guys there are gutted about this, and it is a shame. Why?

Performancing was/is/will be again a great site. It was a proper community of bloggers, giving an example of how Drupal can be used to forge great togetherness online. The blog editor is a super tool and an example of software written by bloggers for bloggers – not forcing functionality upon users. Furthermore, those involved, like Nick Wilson and Chris Garrett are good people, and it would be a shame to lose them. As Darren Rowse notes:

I loved Performancing the most when it was just a blog. They produced amazing content and generated wonderful conversations. Perhaps it’s time to go back to that?

The idea appears to be to go back to the days of Performancing as a blogging community. This is Good News. It looks like ScribeFire will remain separate, which is no bad thing, but it will be cool if the Performancing community looks after it. In Wilson’s words:

• We are still interested in talking to potential partners that could help us relaunch our adnetwork – there is a ton of functionality never released and I’d love to have conversations with serious players re the possibilities.
• ScribeFire also needs some help. Jed Brown has gone MIA and we need some hlep talking it further.
• We still plan to open source Metrics, but there is no firm time frame
• And lastly, but by no means least. I intend to correct some of the mistakes I’ve made with community functionality and management here at Performancing, and again, am entirely open to suggestions and partnerships that will take us forward in 2007

Wilson was obviously unhappy with the direction Performancing was taking in his absence, and all credit to him for stepping in and trying to sort things out. Let’s hope Performancing goes on to bigger and better things in the future.

Technorati Tags: performancing

Wikipedia is never far from the news, and the last week is no different.

First up is the decision to make outgoing links from Wikipedia include the nofollow tag. This basically means that the links are worth nothing in terms of search engine juice. They’ve done this as an antispam measure, but that’s no guarantee that it will work, as many commentators have pointed out. Just from my point of view, the fact that WordPress sticks nofollow on comment links on my blogs does not stop spammers attempting to post comments anyway. As Matt Mullenweg points out:

Wikipedia has decided to nofollow all external links to help offset people spamming the service. In theory this should work perfectly, but in practice although all major blogging tools did this two years ago and comment and trackback spam is still 100 times worse now. In hindsight, I don’t think nofollow had much of an effect, though I’m still glad we tried it.

There are also issues around the fact that Wikipedia is a link-attracting behemoth. Everyone links to it. So they’re taking all this inward traffic and search engine juice, but not giving anything out in return. That’s bad.

Mike Arrington notes another Wikipedia scandal-in-the-offing – Microsoft paying Wikipedia editors to do their bidding. On the face of it, that sucks, but when you read into it, Microsoft appear to at least be trying to do the right thing. As Rick Jeliffe (the Wikiwonk in question) writes:

…I was a little surprised to receive email a couple of days ago from Microsoft saying they wanted to contract someone independent but friendly (me) for a couple of days to provide more balance on Wikipedia concerning ODF/OOXML. I am hardly the poster boy of Microsoft partisanship! Apparently they are frustrated at the amount of spin from some ODF stakeholders on Wikipedia and blogs.

I think I’ll accept it: FUD enrages me and MS certainly are not hiring me to add any pro-MS FUD, just to correct any errors I see. If anyone sees any examples of incorrect statements on Wikipedia or other similar forums in the next few weeks, please let me know: whether anti-OOXML or anti-ODF. In fact, I already had added some material to Wikipedia several months ago, so it is not something new, so I’ll spend a couple of days mythbusting and adding more information.

Needless to say, Jimmy Wales and the other Wikipedia fans aren’t too pleased. Arrington notes that

It’s clear that the only way to safely clear the record on Wikipedia when you are involved party is in the discussion area of a page. Paying others to make direct changes isn’t smart, even if you tell them they are free to write their unbiased opinions (as happened in this case). And making direct changes yourself is likely to get you in hot water, too.

It’s a tricky situation. Microsoft tried to find a positive way through the mire of editing Wikipedia pages to right what were, in their eyes, wrongs. In turn, they got it wrong. Arrington’s way forward, of using the Talk page, might be one way through.

Edit: Weird. I just went back to the TechCrunch article to snaffle the link to Arrington’s article, and it’s gone. Not sure what this means about the story…

Technorati Tags: wikipedia, nofollow, microsoft, ibm

More catching up here. Aravind emailed me a few days ago about Zoho‘s new tie in with Omnidrive.

Readers of this blog know exactly who Zoho are (the best online office guys IN THE WORLD!) – but who Omnidrive?

Well, they are an online storage company, of course. A bit like Box.net, who I have always used up till now.

The two companies have come up with a really cool tie-in though, whereby various documents stored on Omnidrive can be loaded up easily into the appropriate Zoho editor. As the Zoho blog says:

What does this mean? Well, if you have your documents online in OmniDrive, you can view/edit these documents just by double clicking on them. The documents then are opened in Zoho Applications.

I immediately signed up for a free Omnidrive account (like Box.net, it gives you 1gb of storage for nothing) and tried it out. It works like a dream!

Sorry for the lack of posting in recent times, folks. Here’s a biggie I missed out on reporting: the release of WordPress 2.1.

I’ve installed it over on my personal blog, and I have to say it’s a great release that has sorted out a number of the issues people have had with previous releases. Some of the new stuff includes:

• Improved rich text editor with tabbed window for code editing
• Spell checking
• Autosaving of posts
• Ability to have a static home page without needing a plugin
• Improved attachment uploading
• Export and import of other WordPress blogs
• Nicer log in screen
• Slightly confusing link management that ties into post categories

WordPress is easily the best open source blog platform out there now, and probably the best full stop. A giant slap on the back for the developing community.

[tags]blogging, wordpress, wordpress 2.1[/tags]

Problems with the old blog mean that I have had to abandon it for now. At some point I’ll drag the old posts back through to this one. As it is, though, this represents a new start.

I’ve installed the latest version of WordPress, 2.1 – released this evening – though I was tempted by giving Drupal a go. Everything looks pretty good in the new WP, one of the best features is the new code editor, much better than the old one. Means you can correct the odd mistake that the wysiwyg editor produces.

It’ll take me a little while to get everything up and running again – sorting out a theme and getting plug-ins installed. Hopefully all my old favourites will be compatible with 2.1.

Still, I must’ve been doing something right before. Somehow my mug has ended up on 901am‘s shortlist of bloggers. Right next to Guy Kawasaki! Not sure I belong there at all…

The popular open source CMS Drupal released its latest version today. I’ve been using a release candidate version of the new release on a couple of sites-in-development for a few weeks now, and can confirm that it’s a huge improvement on the old one – two big plus points being the beautiful new Garland theme and the graphical installation.

Drupal is a superb piece of software for community building – it includes traditional CMS, multi-author blogging and forum software all in one super-customisable package.

Technorati Tags: drupal

I wrote a bit about Microformats earlier this month, but it looks like they could get a real boost soon with the BBC taking using them for Radio 4 – presumably a move which, if successful, will be rolled out across the board. Vecosys quotes a source:

We’re currently looking at using the event microformat on the redesigned radio 4 schedule page (and possibly throughout bbc.co.uk/radio4) And we’re wondering if a network/service (BBC 1, Radio 4, Radio 1 etc) could be described as a “location”

Technorati Tags: microformats, bbc, vecosys

Congratulations to Chris Garrett on his appointment as CEO of Performancing. Good luck in the new job to him, and to Nick Wilson for his future plans…

Technorati Tags: performancing, chris garrett, nick wilson

MyBlogLog is the cool site that lets you make communities out of the people that visit your website. We’re listed there, and if you are registered, you’ll probably be able to see your photo down the right-hand side of the site somewhere.

Well, like all cool Web2.0 startups, they’ve been bought up. And like Flickr, del.icio.us and countless others, the purchaser is Yahoo!. Here’s some details from the MyBlogLogBlog:

Yahoo! is going to put loads of resources into MyBlogLog and help us roll out a ton of new features. Plus, we’re moving to their infrastructure, which should help with those occasional slowdowns.We are not going to become one of those corporate casualties that never make another step forward. We are hard at work on the custom communities and soon everyone will be able to skin their community to look like their own blog or site.

Good for them! Mike Arrington reckons the deal was worth something like $10 million. He goes on:

The fact that MyBlogLog will be in the Yahoo Developers Network is a good signal. Yahoo’s recent acquisitions have been handled pretty well from a user-care standpoint, and it looks like they’ll be taking a similar approach here. Bradley did say that eventually users will be able to log in with their Yahoo IDs, though. That will expand the potential user base significantly.

Congratulations to the MyBlogLog team. This thing took off like a rocket and never looked back, and we are a proud member.

Hopefully MyBlogLog will be able to continue to grow within Yahoo! and provide an even better service in the future. As for what Yahoo! get out of it, well, I wonder if all the recent interest in site metrics has something to do with it…

Technorati Tags: mybloglog, yahoo!

Wetpaint is a hosted wiki service – more like Wikia than PBwiki, in that it’s probably suited to community sites. The difference between Wetpaint and Wikia though, is that Wetpaint looks good.

Mike Arrington and Zoli Erdos both mention it today, which is how I came by it. Arrington reports the $9.5 million funding they’ve just received. He goes on:

Wetpaint’s key competitor, Wikia, has had more traction with users according to Alexa and Compete statistics, and claims 2.5 million page views per day. Wetpaint doesn’t disclose page views, but CEO Ben Elowitz told me they are “doubling quicker than every 2 months.” Wetpaint has a much more newbie-friendly user interface than Wikia, and is targeting a different audience. Frankly, it’s just a lot more pleasant to look at a typical Wetpaint site than a Wikia one, although the content on Wikia is often much deeper than the equivalent on Wetpaint. Wetpaint says they now have 150,000 unique wikis and over 2.5 million pieces of content contributed by users since launching last June.

Zoli adds his thoughts:

Wetpaint isn’t really just a wiki, it’s a wiki – blog – forum hybrid. Even novice users can just happily type away and create attractive pages with photos, videos, tagging …etc. without the usual learning curve. These pages can be shared, other users can contribute, entire communities can grow and thrive – in fact that’s what it’s all about: online community creation.

So what’s it like? Great! It’s dead simple to sign up to create a new wiki, and it also makes it easy to add all sorts of content. You can see some of the sort of things that are possible at  Wetpaint Central, the  support wiki.

There are plenty of templates you can choose from, including text pages, photo galleries, calendars, schedules and event details. Every page can be commented on, so a sense of community interaction is easy to achieve.

I can think of plenty of uses to put Wetpaint to. Heartily recommended.

Technorati Tags: wetpaint, wikis

In the end, I just used the same theme as hyprtext, but changed a few things around. I like the look, but all the widgets I’m using might make the place look a little cluttered.

Any feedback gratefully received…

Things will be going a bit wobbly ’round these parts over the next day or two. Will be upgrading to 2.06 of WordPress, and sorting myself out with a new theme.

Wish me luck!

Here. Download it while you can!

[tags]jimmy wales, wikipedia, bbc, 5live[/tags]

Simon Dickson reports on Digital Dialogues, of which the DD website explains:

The purpose of Digital Dialogues is to assess the capacity of ICT to support central government’s communication and consultation activity (principally with the public but also with internal stakeholders).

Digital Dialogues takes technology as its focus and seeks to build the capacity within central government for setting up, managing and evaluating digital technology’s contribution to promoting public participation in the policy process. Digital Dialogues has the additional objective of promoting collaboration and exchange between departments.

Just before Christmas, the Hansard Society released a report, which you can read here.

Dickson notes that:

The good news is that, perhaps predictably, the online world comes out of it pretty well. Public engagement is a good thing, and the majority of those drawn to online channels were not previously ‘engaged’; but it should be seen as a complement rather than a replacement for conventional offline methods. There’s also a fair bit on the importance of appropriate planning and ongoing management / moderation.

It all makes interesting reading.

Technorati Tags: social media, digital dialogues, hansard society, simon dickson

Technorati Tags: second life, open source