I argued recently that WordPress is the most innovative open source platform, without being particularly specific.
Yesterday I was talking to Chris Dalby about the Microsoft .NET-based Community Server 2007, which calls itself The World’s Leading Platform for Creating Vibrant Online communities. Obviously the claim is wrong- the world’s leading is of course WordPress.
Where am I going with this? Well Chris has recently decided that WordPress is his lead platform, and he is a Microsoft-head. But that’s not the innovation point. He told me that Community Server now offered Akismet to prevent blog spam. Akismet is from the chaps at Automattic, which is the company formed to allow the WordPress developers to make a living. Akismet is stone cold the best anti blog spam platform out there. Here is one happy user, Elsua:
“Oh My.. I knew there was a reason why I loved Akismet from the very first beginning. Just passed the 200.000 spam comments in elsua.net! WOW”
RedMonk has similar feelings about the platform. If you’re going to use a blog as a primary community communications and research platform you really don’t want a bunch of horrible rascist and sexist blog spam all over the place. Akismet, in conjunction with Bad Behaviour is the real blog spam killer.
Yet another reason to adopt, or migrate to, WordPress, even though Akismet is finding its way to other platforms. Akismet is based on an invention, but is innovation because its widely deployed. It came out of the open source community. I have experience of proprietary blogging platforms Blogger and MoveableType and their protections are nowhere near as good. So there you have it – open source innovation, which is something some people claim is impossible.
andyp says:
May 4, 2007 at 12:05 pm
Indeed. Akismet has caught so much spam for me that I don’t bother to check for false positives now, it would be too hard to identify them 🙁
Mike Gotta says:
May 4, 2007 at 12:15 pm
James, Although not an open source platform, you might check out Traction Software – comprehensive hypertext underpinnings. Also hear good things about blogs and Drupal from clients who are using open source and want synergies between their blog decision and overall ECm efforts.
Ian Skerrett says:
May 4, 2007 at 1:04 pm
I agree WordPress and Akismet rock! I am sooooo glad to be off of Blogger.
Chris Dalby says:
May 6, 2007 at 2:34 pm
What I would like to see is a .NET community platform that ticks all the technical boxes, but also allows integration with all the best community features like flickr, delicious, technorati, feedburner, last.fm. etc.
Name the top 10 blog platforms, and a .NET system would not be there.
Jay Pullur says:
May 7, 2007 at 2:26 pm
I agree with Andy. Akismet does a wonderful job on filtering. I have checked several times in the spam bin and found it to be waste of time digging through it. Overall, WordPress is great.
Mike Dolan says:
May 9, 2007 at 12:05 am
+1 James. I wrote my own blog/site system and used it for quite some time. Once I tested WordPress, the idea of ever going back was gone. I can get thousands of spams in a month and Akismet catches most of them… that’s a lot of time saved – heck, I would have in the alternative just turned off commenting altogether.
Matt says:
May 9, 2007 at 9:01 am
I appreciate the kind words.
jgovernor says:
May 9, 2007 at 2:39 pm
thanks Matt. What can I say – you’re making life better for a lot of people.
Mike Dolan and Jay Pullur – rock on guys.
Ian Skerret- what did we tell you?
Chris- I wonder if you could suggest working with CommunityServer to better integrate with external APIs?
Mike Gotta – Traction is cool, and I can see a real utility. But it doesn’t have the community or extensibility of WordPress.