Joho the Blog
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March 31, 2005
Shelley has a considered piece on the discovery that WordPress, the open source blogging software, has been hosting a link farm on its site. " I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people making money from their art," she says. But, she adds, "I can also see that there’s been a dimming of the joy of this medium, as more and more people turn to these pages as a way to make a buck." And she concludes:
It's a forgiving piece — the final paragraph recounts how the Romans would make sure triumphant generals would remember they are mortals — which is great to read. We're all human. But I don't think the problem is that WordPress made some money. It's the fact that link farms make one of our tools, Google, less useful. And it's the lack of transparency. Of course, you can't long host a link farm if you're transparent about it, which is a reason for a legit site not to host one. But why does WordPress owe us anything? In a legal and formal sense, it doesn't. But, part of the joy of the Net — and I think Shelley is exactly right to use the word "joy" here — has been the forging of new, personal relationships with the companies that we engage with, whether they're for free or for pay. I feel oddly connected to Firefox, Six Apart, TinyApps.org, and hundreds of others, large and small, free and commercial, because I feel that they're doing something for the community first; they're not in it only for themselves. I trust them to do the right thing for us. When they don't, I feel betrayed. It's not that big a deal, and I don't go all binary on them. But the sense of betrayal demonstrates the depth of the bond. So, IMO, WordPress made a mistake. The mistake definitely wasn't making money. It was making money in a way that works against the interests of the Web community. As Shelley says, that doesn't make the WordPress code any worse, and I may switch from Movable Type to WordPress at some point. Forgiveness is totally in order. Yet the abrading of joy does matter. [Technorati tags: wordpress burningbird google] Matt's response to the brouhaha is here. Posted
by D. Weinberger at March 31, 2005 07:27 AM
TrackBackListed below are links to weblogs that reference Burningbird on WordPress' link farm:
» WordPress: Not Good from John Battelle's Searchblog Tracked on March 31, 2005 06:57 PM
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» WordPress y el spam from Microsiervos Tracked on September 11, 2005 02:33 PM |
Comments
I've just been trying to get to the Word Press website, and it's been offline for a while now. It was up earlier this morning (about 10 am UK time), ago, but when I tried to go there about 30 minutes ago, it was down, and has been since.
I wonder if they have pulled it off for a while, as more and more people are posting about this.
It was certainly interesting to read. I've recently switched from Blogger to WordPress, and am impressed. I hope that this current information doesn't put too many potential users off....
Posted by: Emma | March 31, 2005 08:44 AM
How was the transition?
Posted by: David Weinberger | March 31, 2005 11:12 AM
Perhaps what worries me about WordPress's actions is that they made every WordPress user an unwitting accomplice to the corruption of Google. The link back to WordPress was a kind of public service shout-out -- a recognition of thanks offered up in a positive spirit. But using the PageRank those links helped generate for an SEO scheme meant that those gestures were in fact doing some mild badness. That gives me the moral willies.
Posted by: James Grimmelmann | March 31, 2005 11:17 PM
"So, IMO, WordPress made a mistake. The mistake definitely wasn't making money. It was making money in a way that works against the interests of the Web community."
One of the issues here is that open source projects like Wordpress are all being done on good will, a sort of good will barter.
How does that become fungible?
Cash transactions go a long way toward resolving this issue. I set a price on a product, you pay me. We're done.
Posted by: Bud Gibson | April 1, 2005 04:24 AM
I understand what you are saying Bud, but without the open source model many of these projects would never see the light of day. They require the participation of the community to develop and mature. This participation is repaid in the form of available software.
This presents problems when you say we simply 'pay' someone. Who? While Matt has certainly played a big part in pushing wordpress forward, this project itself was built on the work programmers carried out on B2 (another blog). They also carried out this work on the basis that it would continue to be freely available to all.
Posted by: Nick Wilsdon | April 1, 2005 10:26 AM
Thanks for your comments on everything, I've tried to sum up the issues from my point of view here:
http://photomatt.net/2005/04/01/a-response/
Posted by: Matt | April 1, 2005 05:08 PM
It has been found out that the friendly old lady from down the block, who always bakes lovely cookies for everybody, is the person who has been drowning the neighbourhood cats the past few months. The very person who defined what neighbourly conduct meant, has now been discovered defining the oposite too.
She may have had good reasons: she claims the cats scare her birds. None of my cats were hurt; not directly anyway. What should I do with her cookies that are left lying in my house?
Posted by: Branko Collin | April 3, 2005 12:20 PM
Gaming the system isn't unusual, and it's only unethical if it breaks some kind of rule. I think we're dealing with an implicit rather than explicit understanding of how google wanted its ads to work. Matt found a way past that. I hope he made a few bucks, but I doubt he'll collect. The light of public weirdness is shining on him now.
Thanks for pointing to Shelley's piece david. I'll be sure to read it one day soon. I am perfectly ill informed about this having only skimmed a reference to it at Robert Cox' "National Debate."
Oh, regardless of who zoomed whom on this, I'm a new WordPress user and I like it a lot and intend to continue to work with the lovely tool those folks provided. The hypertalented Matt Mullenweg is one of the benefits of working with WordPress. Of course, when WordForm is ready for primetime I'll check it out too!
Posted by: fp | April 5, 2005 11:23 PM
Gaming the system is unethical if it breaks some kind of moral code*; is that the same thing as a rule? I am not a native speaker of English; I tend to associate "rule" with "law" (although you can have "unwritten rules"; the very netiquette we're discussing is a good example).
Posted by: Branko Collin | April 13, 2005 06:10 AM