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don’t necessarily agree with some of the ordering, but they’ve got most of my favorite ’06 albums on here (no surprise)
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interesting analysis of Theo’s trade record, which is decidedly mixed
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“But there’s a huge difference between the size of the PyBlosxom community and the size of the WordPress community, and that’s what won me over in the end.” – biggest community wins
tecosystems
links for 2007-01-02
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Ted Leung on the Air » Blog Archive » Size isn’t everything says:
January 2, 2007 at 11:38 pm
[…] Stephen O’Grady del.icio.us’ed the inaugural post of the new blog, and his comment was “biggest community wins”. It’s true that the size of a community matters, but it’s not as simple as absolute size. Communities need to reach a point where they become resilient and self sustaining. […]
sogrady says:
January 3, 2007 at 1:51 am
Here’s the comment I posted over at Ted’s blog (which I think is being moderated):
The del.icio.us text size being fairly delimited, I didn’t have quite the space I needed to flesh out the “Biggest Community Wins” argument alluded to in my link. The comment, in fact, was merely a reference to an earlier post here describing our own move from Movable Type to WordPress.
In short, though, there’s not much I disagree with above. Size is not the only metric for success (particularly for niche or non-platform technologies), it’s dependent on a variety of other factors as noted, and it’s not everything.
That said, I think if one looks at the history of the software industry, it indicates that community size is the single most accurate gauge for success. Think Windows, Linux, or the phenomenon known as WordPress. Communities are built and sustained through different paths or different means, but in the end size does matter. A lot.
It may not guarantee longevity, and it certainly doesn’t indicate technical excellence, but it does encourage adoption. Which in the end, as VHS taught us, is probably what really matters.