wordpress

Social networks, or beefed-up blogs?

I have been looking around recently at social networkings systems, focusing on freely available ones, such as Elgg (which powers the rather lovely UnLtdWorld, and which has its proper v1.0 release out soon) and PeopleAggregator. The other option I had thought of would be to fashion something out of Drupal.

A post at Read/WriteWeb, however, has made me step back and think a little:

Platforms like WordPress and Movable Type democratized the process of self-publishing. With these tools, everyone could be a publisher and it didn’t require advanced technical expertise to do so. Now, the next revolution for publishing is to bring that same ease of creation to the process of building social networks. With Six Apart’s recent release of Movable Type 4.2, that revolution has begun. The new release provides DIY tools for building your own social networking platform which includes member profiles, forums, friending capabilities, rating of content, and more. WordPress isn’t too far behind, either – a new platform called BuddyPress, is being built on the WordPress core. Is this the future of blogging? Or is this the future of web publishing altogether?

I had been aware of BuddyPress for a while, but whilst I have noted Moveable Type’s development, I’ve never really go into that platform, for some reason. I think the Buddy/WordPress approach is sound, though, not building up the core functionality of the platform, but adding the social networking features as add-ons. If you want it, it’s there to use, otherwise you don’t need to be troubled with it.

BuddyPress is sadly some way from being production ready, so for now I’ll stick with the dedicated social network platforms. But in the future, rather than learn a new system, it will be a lot easier to use one I am familiar with to develop exactly what I need.

What are other folks’ views?

Posting links

Since delicious upgraded itself, the automatic posting of stuff I have bookmarked has stragely stopped on DavePress. Not at all sure why.

Anyway, to improve things, I have installed the Postalicious plugin for WordPress, which will handle all this for me, on the recommendation of the social media John Virgo, Jon Bounds. There are quite a lot of options and configuration to be done, so I might have to tweak it a bit over the next few days, but hopefully normal service will now be resumed.

ColaLife.org

Simon Berry’s ColaLife campaign is a truly wonderful thing, a real example of using the groundswell to develop an idea into a campaign and then, hopefully, into action.

I was always at a bit of a loss, wanting to help out more than just joining the Facebook group, but not knowing really what I could do. Other than build websites, of course…

So that’s what I did. ColaLife now has an external web presence, so people can find out about it without being a Facebooker. I made the site deliberately simple to navigate, hiding the blog bit away and relying on images to help get the message across. Another great example of WordPress as CMS…

We’ve imported all the posts from Simon’s personal blog onto the site, so it can become the central repository for all things ColaLife. In the meantime, do register your support by joining the FB group and the Google email group.

Large female required

I was delighted to be a part of the winning pub quiz team at WordCampUK, not least because it meant that I won a wicked cool dark green WordPress tshirt. I asked the now-legendary quiz host Jon Bounds for a large, and a large was what I got.

Only, it’s in the ladies style, which makes it significantly smaller than me.

So, there is a free WP tshirt going spare to any suitably sized female who wants it. Let me know in the comments or by email. See the photo of Automattic dude Sam Bauers below, who is sporting the manly version.

Sam Bauers in Green WP T Shirt
Photo by Benjamin
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