Performancing: Back from the Brink?

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.

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Wikipedia Woes

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…

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Zoho and Omnidrive

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!

WordPress 2.1

WordPress

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]

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