wordpress™ wank

Me, leaping in to dispel the impression that Automattic is a woman-free zone? Wonders will never cease.

Although, if you will keep your sole female employee hidden on your corporate site while making public announcements about the appointment of pretty much all the others, you have to expect a little flack.

I can completely see why wordpress.com users unaware of the community issues with wordpress would be surprised by the lack of female faces. To them, Automattic’s just another 2.0 startup. They’re unaware of a context where women were getting involved, yes, but it was proving next to impossible to keep them involved. I wrote on some of the reasons for this last year, and I have nothing much to add to that; except that it’s become clearer in the intervening months that men are as alienated by the way the project’s run as women are. It’s just that women get switched off faster because they already know what not being listened to looks like, and it isn’t as much of a shock to them. The women who commented on that thread are testing Habari now. This is not a coincidence.

I don’t think Automattic should run out and hire a couple of token women because it would make them look better. They should think about whether it might be time to start hiring a few more people from outside the community, even if by doing so they ran the risk of them not understanding how things work around here. Because if they didn’t understand how things have always worked, then things might have to start working differently. And that might be good.

(In reality? If you don’t understand the way things work, you don’t last very long. Still, nice to dream.)

Not to worry, seems 2.2 is already feature-complete and our input is no longer required:

Here’s an idea. Fix your ideas forum. I wasn’t even able to log in the other day.

2.1 is out. Yawn. Nothing here we haven’t had on .com for months already, and you didn’t see me shifting my self-hosted stuff over here to partake of the fantastic new features. You can see why Matt kept forgetting what was in it.

If 2.2 is timetabled for April they’re really going to be struggling for new stuff to trumpet. I predict built-in Snap previews, Sonific in core and another page from Shuttle.

Yeah, yeah, I know I promised ‘no more habari wank’, but, while it sounds lovely and utopian in theory the issues with welcoming all comers with open arms are beginning to become apparent.

If anything I said here helped create the general impression that Habari is a refuge for abused fanboys rather than yet-to-be-released blogging software, I’m really sorry, OK? Because I don’t think that image helps anyone. It doesn’t help Habari, because it makes them look like a project inspired and driven forward by the personal animosity of a bunch of guys towards Matt, and that is only appealing to a very, very small subsection of their potential userbase. It doesn’t help WordPress, because it makes them sound like an evil corporate monolith tyrannised over by a dictator who is cruel to fanboys; but a) this is a slight exaggeration, and b) a couple of the fanboys may have deserved it. It doesn’t even help the still-loyal fanboys who are given to saying that Habari only exists thanks to the personal animosity of a bunch of guys towards Matt, because the loyal fanboys are strangely reluctant to give anyone their URLs and consequently get no Google love. I don’t know whether they’re keeping schtum because we will laugh at their content-free blogs, or at their Kubricks, or because they fear an onslaught of rabid Matt-haters. Perhaps they just don’t exist. That would be reassuring.

Oh, and as my comment on this news blog entry is currently mysteriously languishing in moderation even though the fifty or so after it have been approved, here it is:

Lovely, for the past few hours you have been inflicting these ridiculous popups on my readers without my knowledge or permission. Thank you so very much.

I have yet to hear your reasons for making this frivolous little ‘feature’ opt-out rather than opt-in (certainly if somebody proposed it for wordpress.org you’d be the first to yell ‘plugin material’), and until I do I will have to assume that you’re getting some sort of kickback from Snap for putting it on everyone’s blogs by default.

Wonder how much they made? Enough to consider letting us opt-out of Automattic’s ads on our blogs? I am getting tired of people coming into the forums wanting an explanation for adsense on blogs they always thought were ad-free. Even if the ToS allows wordpress.com to do whatever they like without informing us, squirrelling this information away in a blog entry is not full disclosure.

I realise that being upfront with people about the possibility of ads appearing on their blogs might reduce the number of signups a little (not by a huge amount — many people are more than willing to put up with ads in return for a free service), but you know, tough. Sometimes it’s better to be honest about an unpalatable truth than attempt to hide it. Advertising and false advertising are not things to boast about, true, but when you try to hide them that makes you look a hundred times worse.

It was then that I moodily declared I have nothing to contribute and “good luck” with Habari.

Nuclear Moose has already left in a fit of pique and come back with his tail between his legs? Things move fast in this brave new 2.0 world of ours.

[must not blog any more habari wank. Apart from it being OT, it is treading on the toes of habariwank and I wouldn't want to raise her blood pressure any higher than it is already.]

Prompted by Habari’s emphasis upon development by the community rather than the elite few, Matt launches a PR exercise to dispel the popular image of WP development. Hey, don’t knock it. Matt discovering PR (that’s public relations, not page rank, of which he has been well aware for some time now) is an interesting development in itself, even if he does end up having to mark down any suggestions he doesn’t like and abandon the idea of displaying the kvetches.

So, k2’s definitely not going to be the next default. Habari bagged it already. I hope they at least change the colours.

I think the odds on Matt’s as yet unborn Frankenstein baby (a BBH bred from Canvas and Garland but recognising only Matt as its daddy) just shortened a bit more.

eta: then again, Matt does say Habari reminds him of Drupal, so maybe we shouldn’t rule out him filching their default after all

Wow, can the fanboys get any more demented?

In a nutshell, the blogging market is c.l.o.s.e.d. – as in no more room, and most importantly, no more competition; because let’s face it, whatever you’ve got, it’s just never going to be good enough.

Oh, where do I start? You know, in 2001 I bet people were saying much the same thing about how Blogger had invented blogging by liberating people from static html, and I’m sure everyone in 2003 believed that Movable Type was the platform of the future as it freed them from reliance on Blogger’s wonky servers. (I’m actually stunned Anil Dash hasn’t shown up in the comments yet. Maybe he’s languishing in moderation as one of the Enemy.) And, outside your little fanboy bubble, everyone in 2006 was saying standalone blogging is yesterday’s news and social networking with a blogging component is where it’s at. If you run around predicting the future in this field you end up looking stupid. You don’t know what the kids are working on in their bedrooms.

In perfect illustration of the above point: disgruntled hackers give up beating their head against the brick wall and fork! At last! Except it’s not a fork. It’s better than a fork, because they’re starting again from the ground up and don’t have to worry about backward compatibility. Of course, it’s early days yet, but there’s some recognisable names in the mix. We’re talking people who may not have quite made it into the Default Blogroll of Google Love, but might well have done if they’d sucked up to Matt a little more. You were wondering why Owen Winkler vanished from your dashboard? You were wondering whether Skippy would turn his backup-plugin-related ire to constructive use? You were wondering whether the Shuttle team would be able to put their disillusionment behind them? OK, probably not, but anyway, wonder no more.

WP managed to overtake MT because it eliminated the pain of rebuilding, had better spam handling, and didn’t piss people off by trying to make them pay for stuff. It remains to be seen whether this lot can capitalise on the relative neglect of wordpress.org in favour of .com, but if they can implement multiblogs, build in podcasting and video features and build a better image uploader, they could have a potential winner on their hands. Nonetheless, it’s early days yet, I would not want to jinx them by fangirling or hubristic predictions, and I don’t know enough about Linux to tell you whether development-by-committee is a really good idea or a really bad one; although I am fully expecting an influx of Linux geeks to the comments telling me it is the best thing ever, and will be disappointed if I do not get it.

(Also the name ‘Habari’ is a little too Ubuntu-wannabe for my taste as well as making me think of Habbo Hotel, which cannot be good. Still, the mockups are pretty.)