Ok so the headline is a little punchy/paunchy, given two people can’t really be a trend, but I wanted to call out that Kim Cameron, recently named Identity’s God, has moved to WordPress.
This follows Scoble‘s decision (which to my mind is choosing a great tool for the job rather than hypocrisy) to adopt the nifty open source blogging platform.
Its surprising Microsoft doesn’t have a runner in this race (enterprise blogging) yet (don’t get me started on Spaces) but then again, the dirssruption has only just begun. Sun and IBM are now both now contributing to Roller, but using a range of platforms for publishing.
One of the issues here is that companies are not yet mandating blogging platforms – bloggers tend to choose their own. That laissez faire attitude is likely to change in 2006 as corporations attempt to bring the unmanaged spaces of blogs back into the managed spaces fold: we’ll be talking blogs and digital restrictions management before you know it. We’re going to see the usual industry consolidation and blog platform players will need to establish new partnerships and go to market models. 2006 is the year when the tech leviathans will shift from using blogging to selling it.
We should expect to see blogging and social software practices from the likes of Accenture and IGS, and clearer platform development and marketing from the ISV community.
So what happens when Microsoft offers its own feed server or blogging server product? Do Kim and Scoble rehost again? I guess the choice is theirs. What about customers and prospects that expect dogfood eating? I don’t think Sharepoint meets feeds is a blogging platform any more than Lotus Domino is. To Scoble’s point: is Microsoft going to buy Newsgator or not? Its actually kind of weird they haven’t, what with the chance to control an API, and buy something already tightly integrated with Microsoft tooling. This acquisition would be about feed aggregating and reading rather than blog and feed serving. It wouldn’t provide a publishing platform, but publishing and subscribing are going to come together anyway in the longer term, through OPML and SSE, or ATOM. Oh yeah – what is the MSDN blogging engine, anyway?
For now though, what great references for WordPress. Another lame prediction for 06: it will be a great year for WordPress, which may mean a bigger apartment for the guys at Automattic.
Finally let me say the blog spam issue drives me crazy. If Movable Type doesn’t get its act together soon monkchips and tecosystems may be joining Kim and Scoble. We don’t care whether the tool is open source or not, we just want the best tool for the best cost.
Ed Brill says:
January 11, 2006 at 3:38 pm
The comparative between Domino and Sharepoint as a blogging platform is apples and oranges. I don’t know of any blogs running on Sharepoint — but I do know of hundreds (if not thousands) running on Domino. It doesn’t mean that (today) it is a preferred platform, but I’m not exactly the only one blogging on it.
As for IBM bloggers– there are a number using the developerWorks blogging tools (not sure what they are based on). the Roller implementation is the intranet blogs. I think you’ll hear more about this topic from IBM in the coming weeks.
Cote' says:
January 11, 2006 at 4:12 pm
Which ever blogging platform you switch over to, make sure it tell commenters what “inappropriate” content they’ve put in comments. Just about every fuc…oh, almost tripped it there…er…”darn” time I post a comment here, I get that message.
As far as spam, I get about 2-15 spam comments a day. But, thanks to the “hold for moderation if it contains more than X links” functionality in WordPress, almost all of them can be caught before they get posted. I’m sure I could install some plugin — like those “What dos 30+2 equal?” ones — but I’ve got better stuff to do than fight the spam war. The link thing seems good enough.
Jaime Cardoso says:
January 11, 2006 at 8:14 pm
Curiously, what bother me the most in this post was the tought of Accenture Blogging (not to mention how would he convert that into billable hours). Can one use MS Powerpoint to post to blogs automatically?
Dennis Howlett says:
January 12, 2006 at 4:18 am
Yep – I gave up on all MT platforms a while back. I think you’d agree James I don’t exactly qualify as super geek but I’d become totally pissed off with one problem or another.
WP is great and I can do most things I need reasonably easily. There’s gazillions of folk out there able, willing and ready to help. I wish I could say the same about the more than adequate and potentially enterprise strength Expression Engine and Drupal. But then I’ve been mooching around mySmartChannels. That looks cool (if expensive for single users.)
What I particularly like is that website designers are finding cool ways to skin WP to build in trading functionality.
And a little birdie tells me a European SaaS vendor will be offering all of that, RSS everywhere, plus a ton of Ajax style tools (calendar, to do notes, an accounting application with built in links to advisors, email, phone and fax message centre etc etc plus a gig of storage) at prices only an ISP/telco could seriously think about – very soon. How might that impact all sorts of markets?
Think ISP, telco, professionals, call centre, banks, marketers, courier services…the list goes on. And that’s just for the start up type business. What might be available for the enterprise?
I think we’ve barely scratched the surface of this stuff.
james governor says:
January 12, 2006 at 3:22 pm
great point cote. i am worried and have been for some time that i have lost commenters and comments because MT is so dumb. i just havent beaten up stephen hard enough to port to WP…
Anil says:
January 16, 2006 at 8:11 am
I should mention that we’ve got literally dozens of MS bloggers on MT and TypePad, including Robert Scoble’s other blog. I’m curious to understand what you’re afraid of, exactly, James — MT’s quite reliable in maintaining your database, especially if you’re on a MySQL database. I think you’ll have a *far* better experience if you’re on a current version of MT (3.2 is the current version), where all the community management and spam fighting are automatic. There’s still no other platform that offers the power of a built-in junk folder in the way that Movable Type 3.2 does, and it’s worth taking a look to see what a difference it can make.
(One of MT’s big strengths is in supporting multiple databases, something the other platforms mentioned above don’t let you do.)
james governor says:
January 16, 2006 at 3:44 pm
what i am “afraid of”? that’s a mighty strange way of putting it.
Riverbelle says:
January 20, 2006 at 5:12 pm
Hey are you guys still accepting commments here?
james governor says:
January 23, 2006 at 9:16 am
hey riverbelle – to cote’s point our filters are not exactly as granular as they need to be. i am going to do something about that this week. sorry. please send me an email with the message [email protected] and i will find out what the blockage is.
Kim Cameron says:
October 18, 2006 at 6:45 pm
Cool post and comments. I specifically wanted to use a LAMP blogging platform so I could reach past the edge of my “silo”, understand the issues faced on other platforms, and demonstrate that we need to work together across the industry to get identity problems solved.
I understand there is some good blogging software on windows platform – maybe I’ll give it a try one day too.
apartment says:
August 4, 2007 at 11:31 am
“Its surprising Microsoft doesn’t have a runner in this race (enterprise blogging) yet”
Yep, give it time and i am sure they will try to dominate this market too, maybe add something into windows to publish driect to your blog from your desktop!
Tina Anderson says:
February 29, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Microsoft could only add value and features to this market. I disagree with everyone who says they ruin everything. They are a great company and they can’t help it if they rose to the top of the industry.