Woe Is Wordpress
We'd like this post to be a celebration of the work done by David Sifry and all our friends at Technorati, who recorded their billionth link tracked today. In 2002, David "Wanted to know when somebody said something about me," and eventually helped develop one of our favorite tools for searching the web in real time. Technorati helped change the conception of the web as the "world's biggest library" into something dynamic and relevant. 35,000 new bloggers signed up last month, at an average of one new blogger every three seconds. Unfortunately, some recent events overshadowed the festivities.
There's been another kerfuffle on the internet, and this time it involves a Friend of SFist -- namely, Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress. Unfortunately for him, it happened just as he started in on a vacation of Europe. So the weight of the internet ire fell on Jonas Luster -- to the tune of 19 media contacts, 650 emails and 144 missed calls on his Treo. Let's see if we can summarize the situation quickly, after the jump, so that we can get to his story in its gory entirety.
Before the 17th of February, Matt had agreed to allow Hot Nacho, a web marketing firm that many consider to be on the blackhat side of the Search Engine Optimization services spectrum, to host thousands of their 'articles' at Wordpress.org. Why would Hot Nacho be interested? Because every install of Wordpress has a link back to that URL, making a link to Wordpress.org very valuable in terms of Google Pagerank. Some have accused Hot Nacho of basically gaming the Adsense network, and Google had already assigned them their lowest Pagerank, essentially removing them from their search engine.
This was discovered in one of the Wordpress support forums, and shortly thereafter the thread was shut down. Matt then left an explanation, leaving the thread closed. Weeks later, Andy at Waxy.org found it and typed a post. Niall Kennedy sent an email to Jonas Luster, and almost simultaneously it hit Slashdot. After working two days straight on site tags for Wordpress, and before Jonas could even finish reading the post, 'Miriam' from the New York Times was on the phone. All he could tell her at the time was "No comment."
We heard about the story through a trackback to the post covering Matt's announcement of Wordpress incorporating. We were certainly surprised by the move. Matt had long preached the spam-fighting capacities of Wordpress relative to a product like MovableType. Could he have really gone over to the dark side? Earlier today, as we researched the story, we found that the data in the offending Wordpress.org/archives/ folder had been removed. We learned later that this was done by Matt himself, who is aware of the situation but unavailable for comment in Italy. Jonas has promised that a statement is forthcoming. In the meantime, Google and Yahoo have all purged their databases of links to the articles (as of writing, they are still on MSN Search) and Google has manually reassigned Wordpress.org the same low ranking as Hot Nacho.
Why did Matt do it? Nobody can say for sure. The more pressing question is why he didn't tell anybody he needed or wanted to do it. But from our discussions with interested parties, we heard rumors placing a figure at around $10,000 for a month of hosting Hot Nacho's content. As Jonas explained, donations to the Wordpress effort had been tailing off just as their ambition had begun to ignite, and if there's anything spammers are good at, it's convincing you to take the easy money.
Jonas says that Wordpress, Inc. should be called the Wordpress Foundation, on the Apache Foundation model. Which makes sense in an open-source environment. But Jonas also complains that in the community, it's taken for granted that Matt has produced a great product, but that doesn't mean that he isn't a human being. "I feel like the archangle Gabriel," Jonas explained. "The man isn't God, and he isn't evil. He's a twenty-one year old coder." While he agreed that it could appear that Matt was 'cashing in' on the work of others, he's been in touch with other Wordpress developers, and wasn't worried about the Google Pagerank demotion.
Speaking to the assembled parties at the Technorati party (where the news cast something of a somber pall on the event), Jonas explained to the "thought leaders of Silicon Valley:" "Take my word for it, we're not the evil guys." SFist knows for a fact that Wordpress aren't the bad guys, but that doesn't mean people can't make bad decisions. Our worry is what effect this will have on the Wordpress development community. And we hope that this humbles Matt, because as a friend we'd tell him that hubris is still a mistake on a mythological level. It shouldn't, however, hobble him -- though in the world of open-source coding, your reputation depends on public goodwill.