A small team of high-profile developers are unveiling its new service for hosting customizable but automatically maintained WordPress publishing software installs tonight. WP Engine seeks to serve what they believe is a large market: businesses that need more customizability than WordPress.com hosted accounts offer at low-end prices but more ease of use and scalability support than the millions of WordPress.org users get running open source installs on their own or rented servers.
For $50 a month, the service will offer premium support, automatic security upgrades, recommended plug-in curation and some original software. Scalability durring traffic spikes is one of the company's biggest sales propositions.
There is an intense debate brewing in the open source development community these days whose resolution could have widespread implications for the sharing and distribution of software. Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, disagrees with the way Chris Pearson, creator of a popular WordPress theme and framework, has chosen to distributed his product - a method he believes is against the rules and licenses WordPress operates under. The two seem to be unwaveringly at odds, which could mean a lawsuit is on the horizon, but what would that mean for free software distribution?
Squarespace, one of the largest professional blogging platforms, just announced that it has received a $38.5 million investment from Index Ventures and Accel Partners. Until now, the company, which was founded by then 21-year-old Anthony Casalena, did not take any institutional outside investments. Instead, Squarespace, which offers a trial version of its service but no free tier, has been growing organically. The company plans to use the new cash influx for product development and to hire more team members.
San Francisco-based micro-blogging service Posterous launched a marketing campaign back in June that raised a few eyebrows across the Web for its apparently brazen approach. The company has been rolling out new tools since the beginning of the campaign aimed at helping new and existing users transplant their data onto Posterous from other services - services it referred to as "dying platforms." Today, the campaign came to a close with the release of the company's final switch tool for the behemoth blogging platform, Wordpress.
ReadWriteWeb is looking for a part-time, late-afternoon/evening news writer. It's a great opportunity to make a name for yourself, to work with an awesome team and to learn a whole lot about the web and new media journalism. We'd love for it to turn into a full-time job, if you prove successful. Your geographic location is not important. Your work will be syndicated to the New York Times technology page online, so your family will understand what you're doing. (To some degree.)
I (co-Editor Marshall Kirkpatrick) wrote up this job description and Founding Editor Richard MacManus said, "We'll do it live!" So here you go. Read on for our description of what we're looking for in the next addition to our team.
Update: Matt Mullenweg responded to our email.
"The cause of the outage was a very unfortunate code change that overwrote some key options in the options table for a number of blogs. We brought the site down to prevent damage and have been bringing blogs back after we've verified that they're 100% okay."
Wordpress's hosted service, WordPress.com, was down completely for about an hour, taking blogs like TechCrunch, GigaOm and CNN with it.
Ten years ago, most people were not aware of blogs and blogging. Today, however, blogging is a mainstream phenomenon. While it doesn't get the same hype as Twitter and Facebook today, there are still millions of blogs and bloggers out there. Looking at almost 100 million blog posts in its database, social media monitoring and analytics firm Sysomos created a mini-census of today's blogosphere. Specifically, Sysomos looked at the age, gender and location information attached to these posts.
WordPress, the biggest blog software platform on the Web, has added a "reblogging" curation feature much like the smaller innovative service Tumblr has offered for years. It's another chapter in the race to decrease friction in sharing your favorite Web content with friends.
If the previous era of innovation on the Web was fundamentally characterized by the democratization of publishing and content creation, the next era may be based on finding solutions for building value on top of all that newly published data. Much of that value capture will be performed by machines, but tools for humans could be a game changer as well.
Links - are they a net negative for readers online? That's the idea being deliberately explored by a number of publishers, says writer Nicholas Carr today.
The iconoclastic author says that he has grown sympathetic to the thinking of Steve Gillmor, the almost incomprehensibly future-bound sage tech journalist who has argued for years that "links are dead." Links within articles are a distraction and imply that the reader ought to leave what they are reading to read something else, Carr says. Placing links at the end of articles is more respectful of a person's intentions and concentration. Do you think that's true? I'll skip putting links in this post, until the end, and you can let me know how it feels.
Last month we wrote a short post about using Google Wave for live blogging. Today, during Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook privacy press conference, we decided to put this theory into practice and live blogged the event with Wave. The reaction to our experiment was overwhelmingly positive, so we decided to share how we it up for our live blogging session today.
