A couple of weeks ago, I put out a call for reviews of blog publishing platforms. I got a number of offers to review platforms, and several are now in the works. Strikingly, I got more offers to review WordPress than any other platform, by a wide margin (I did, however, note that I didn’t need reviews of the popular platforms Movable Type, TypePad and Blogger, as I will write those myself).

Anyway, I’m pleased to hereby present the first review about WordPress by by Jeremy C. Wright of Ensight.org. Since I am not familiar with this platform personally (or any of the others I solicited reviews for) and the reviewers who volunteered are obviously fans of their respective platforms, I would love to hear from the rest of you in the Comments thread on this post as to what you think of the review and, more importantly, the platform in question.

UPDATE:
On the recommendation of an off-site commenter, I think it’s probably appropriate for me to give my summary of what I took away from each of these reviews, so here’s what I’d say for WordPress: Overall, Jeremy is quite enthused about it. It’s PHP, which means it generates pages dynamically and doesn’t need to rebuild the whole archive the way Movable Type and other PERL-based platforms do. It’s open-source and free and has an active developer and forum community; based on number of offers I had to review this platform, I’d say it’s got a lot of interest and momentum behind it. While you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to set it up, it is not a piece of cake, either. Jeremy says that may inhibit its ideal use for internal corporate (“intranet”) blogging, as it would probably require someone from IT to set up every new installation, as opposed to being something folks in any department could do themselves. Overall, though, he gives it high marks.

Oh, also, I actually had Jeremy rewrite the review, because his first draft didn’t conform to my question-and-answer format, which he graciously did. Here, for the record, is his original version of the review. The revised version is below here on my blog.

WordPress Review

by Jeremy C. Wright of Ensight.org

There are, quite literally, hundreds of blogging platforms and packages out there. Choosing the right one for you can be such a daunting task that most people simply pick what is most well known, without necessarily picking based on quality of the software or even longevity of the platform.

Thankfully, WordPress is both well known and deserving of its status as the most popular PHP-based blogging platform available.

General performance: What makes this different/better than other blog publishing platforms?

WordPress is fast, has a quick installation, low learning curve and yet is incredibly powerful. It includes a robust plugin system, a full comments system and blogrolling and linkblogs as part of the software. In addition, it includes mobile features like Blogging by Email and Bookmarklets that let you blog any page you are on quickly and easily.

The WordPress community is large and vibrant and the developers are top notch. And, to top it all off, WordPress is free.

What are some of the best advantages about this platform?

Ultimately the choice of blogging software will always come down to a few fundamental questions: Are you looking for a hosted solution? Are you looking for a PHP or Perl-based product (or some other platform specifically, like ASP.NET)? What other features are looking for (comment spam protection, multiple authors, multiple blogs, photo gallery, etc)?

WordPress is designed for those who are not looking for a hosted solution, who are looking for a PHP based solution and who want certain well architected, yet foundational features: standards compliance, dynamic templates, a fully fledged comment system (including anti-spam protection), ease of plugin installation and more. If these are the types of things that are important to you, WordPress may just be the perfect fit.

Finally, the developers are going to stick around. They’ve been doing blogging software since 2001 and are a large part of the blogging community and have been able to create a fantastic product used by thousands upon thousands of bloggers.

What are some of its disadvantages?

There a few smaller features WordPress lacks. Mainly it isn’t that WordPress lacks features, but that certain feature sets are weaker than they need to be. For instance it is difficult to moderate what authors are able to publish and the comment spam protection system is weak and difficult to maintain.

What’s the killer feature, if there is one?

WordPress’s feature which puts it above many other platforms is it’s templating system. Essentially, there is one core template, contained in the index.php file. Every page takes its design from that main one. That doesn’t mean every page needs to look the same.

Each element of the template is modular. So, in order to remove the calendar, you simply remove the <?php get_calendar(); ?> code from your index.php file. Ditto with monthly archives (<?php wp_get_archives(‘type=monthly’); ?>). Keeping the design modular allows for a very flexible presentation layer.

What features does it lack or need fixing?

WordPress’s comment spam protection features definitely need to be looked at. Recently, comment spam overtook email spam as the most intrusive form of advertising for users to have to deal with. Many blogs get hundreds of comment spam attempts per day, and WordPress’s system of having the author moderate each individual comment is far too cumbersome.

In addition, WordPress lacks the ability to have static archives, which are important for larger sites with many older entries both for backups and to decrease server load.

Where does the publishing engine reside? On its own hosted servers, like Blogger or TypePad? On your own web server, like Movable Type? On your desktop, like Userland Radio? Other? (Outerspace?) What advantages/disadvantages do you see in this approach?

The publishing engine resides on your own web server, like MovableType. If you already have your own web server or are using space provided by a shared hosting provider, WordPress will be ideal for your situation. However if you aren’t, the setup and installation of a WordPress blog will require you to purchase a domain, sign up for hosting and then setup the publishing engine.

However, having the software be your own allows for a much greater level of control and flexibility as you can modify the software as you see fit.

What’s the geek factor on this? How comfortable can non-technical people be with it?

Assuming a non-technical person is able to do the initial setup in terms of database details, actually using WordPress is very easy. The documentation is clear and concise and the interface is very easy to work with as it is broken into tasks: Write, Edit, Options, etc.

This means that just about anyone can log into the Control Panel and get to writing very quickly.

What’s the learning curve? Totally intuitive? Lots of features, thus requiring more time to familiarize yourself with all of it?

WordPress’s learning curve is only as steep as you need it to be. While there are lots of features and there is a lot of depth, someone can get started as simply as logging in and writing. They don’t need to setup categories if they don’t want to. They don’t need to do anything besides write, if that is all they need to do.

However there are a lot of options for permanent links for your entries to how articles are read and how dates are displayed through to link blogs and blogrolls. All in all it is simple enough to learn, but deep enough to keep using even for the most advanced user.

What’s involved in setting it up? If you’re not technical, do you need help?

WordPress bills itself as having the simplest installation on the planet: The 5-Minute Installation. To be honest, I’ve found it generally takes me 7 minutes, but then I can be kind of slow. Either way, here is the entirety of the installation instructions:

1. Make sure your host meets the requirements. Also, have a database ready with proper username and password.
2. Unzip the package you downloaded.
3. Open up wp-config-sample.php and fill in your database details. Save and rename the file to wp-config.php.
4. Upload all the files to your webhost
5. Run the installation file. Relative to where you uploaded the files, it’ll be in wp-admin/install.php.

Yep. That’s it. 5 steps.

Beyond that, you will need to login to WordPress, change your password and get acclimatized to the environment. However, the WordPress introduction and wiki provide a lot of help in this area.

In addition, if you are stuck, the WordPress Support Forums are always buzzing. If you need a hand, that’s often the best place to look. As a suggestion, though, you may want to try the Search feature before you post your question as it’s likely that any installation issue you are running into has been encountered, and solved before.

Ultimately WordPress is designed to be simple enough for the casual blogger, but to have the flexibility even the most experienced blogger would need.

Are there platform restrictions? (E.g., PC/Mac, APS vs. Linux servers, SQL Server, etc.)

The only requirements for WordPress are that PHP v4.1 or later be installed and that MySQL v3.23.23 be installed on whatever server you are running. The actual OS can be Windows, Linux or Mac as long as the database and scripting language are present.

Who produces it? Is it an open-source community, a labor-of-love by some programmer, a company with financial backing? What is the likelihood this development team is going to still be at it a year or two from now, providing new features, etc.?

WordPress is an open-source labor-of-love by a large team of programmers and a vibrant support community of thousands of users who love to help out and welcome new bloggers to their community. The development team has been doing blogging software since 2001 and has no plans to stop. They love the medium, love the community and have great plans for the future.

Where is the software developed? How is language support in English (the web site, the manual, the support communities, etc.)? Other languages?

The software is developed largely in Canada and the US. It supports mainly English, though there is documentation and plugins available to transform WordPress’s language into some other ones like French or German.

What’s the pricing of it?

WordPress is completely free under the GPL license.

Is there tech support?

There is support through the WordPress Support Forums and through the WordPress Wiki and Documentation. The primary means of support, though, is the Support Forums.

Is there a good user manual?

Yes. The user manual is available on the website at the Documentation homepage.

Is there a third-party developer community? If so, how active?

There is an active developer community releasing a myriad of plugins (more than 100) and hacks (more than 200). Also, users are able to request help instituting new plugins and hacks (hacks are where code changes to WordPress are necessary to enable functionality).

Is there support for photos galleries?

There are currently several plugins which enable this functionality, though it is not part of the core build.

Is there a built-in Blogroll/Link List kind of feature to manage blogrolls?

Yes, there is advanced functionality for Blogrolls and Linklists.

Can you post via email? Mobile phone/moblog?

There is Blog by Email functionality built into WordPress, and there are moblog plugins available as well.

Does it email posts to subscribers who so choose?

WordPress does not notify subscribers by default when new posts are posted; however, there are [XML] feeds that users can subscribe to in their Feed Reader of choice, and there are plugins to allow users to subscribe to new posts, if the blog author so desires.

Anything notable in the archive features?

WordPress provides very advanced Archive Customization and Archive Rewrite functionality.

Archive Customization:

Your archive URL’s can be fully customized. In fact, the options are sometimes quite staggering. Any combination of categories, authors, post ID’s and date parts (year, month, day, date, minute and second). For example, an Archive Format of:

/archives/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

would give you a URL of

/archives/2003/05/23/my-cheese-sandwich/

Archive Rewrites:

In addition, once you have figured out how you want your archives to look, WordPress gives you all of the .htaccess configuration information you will need (if your host supports it), so that your URL’s will appear to be real files, which means search engines will index them more quickly and effectively.

Does it support comments? Comment-spam filtering? If so (the latter), what’s the approach?

One of WordPress’s weak areas is the area of comment spam. While the Comment system itself is very capable and fully fledged (a full members system, users can subscribe to a comment feed or get notification of new comments through a plugin), the comment spam protection is very basic.

WordPress’s anti-spam system is based primarily on a Moderation Queue. This moderation queue is designed so that any comment which doesn’t match the criteria you specify doesn’t get shown until you approve it. You can choose to either approve every comment, or allow comments through as long as they contain a name and email address and don’t match a word in your Blacklist. In addition, if a comment contains more than a specified number of links it can be placed automatically in the queue (as spam often contains more than 5 links).

The issues with this system are twofold. First, there is no large, central list of words spammers are using like there is with MT-Blacklist. Second, because every comment goes into a queue, you do need to “manually” delete all of the comments in the queue.

That said, there are a couple of hacks and plugins to make life easier including WP-Blacklist (an attempt at duplicating the MT-Blacklist functionality for WordPress) and some easier comment spam moderation techniques. However there isn’t yet a single technique, like MovableType’s MT-Blacklist which is both overwhelmingly effective and incredibly popular, though several people are making inroads.

Does it support trackback?

The WordPress developers are committed to standards in all their forms, from the W3C‘s markup requirements to Trackback and Pingback.

Any idea how well it works on a Mac, with Mozilla or other non-W2K IE platforms?

Because WordPress is web-based, the choice of platform is up to the blog author.

Does it pioneer any other new blog features that other platforms don’t have?

Beyond all else, WordPress pushes “simplicity”. By now most blogging platforms are copying one another’s features, but the simplicity of personal publishing on WordPress is still very hard to beat. Certain platforms like Blogger and TypePad are definitely up there, and WordPress stands tall right along with them in terms of ease of writing, publishing and maintaining a blog of any size.

Does it support multiple authors? If so, does it have decent permission controls? (E.g., can you limit authors to publish only to draft?)

WordPress is built around the concept of multiple authors. While it does only allow one blog (technically) it is geared towards unlimited authors in unlimited categories, which is always a nice thing.

Does it support a simple modular design for page elements? (E.g., when editing templates, are things like blogroll lists, sidebar elements, headers, etc., managed as separate entities, or are they all just in the HTML of a single template?)

WordPress’s design is entirely modular, and can easily be extended because it is PHP-based. Currently only the WordPress elements (calendar, link lists, etc) are modularized; creating other modular elements, however, is quick and easy.

Is it well suited for public corporate blogging? Why or why not?

While WordPress’s suitability for corporate blogging will vary depending on a given company’s requirements, there are a few features which I believe it is lacking, based on my experience with corporate blogging:

1. Individual categories or subsets of content cannot be locked away from certain readers (without hacking the system, which is quite possible since you could ensure that only users of a specific Privilege level saw certain content)
2. Users cannot be forced to save every entry in Draft format for later approval by an editor or manager
3. There are no built-in metrics to gauge how effective the blogging platform is being for the company

However, that isn’t to say WordPress isn’t appropriate. Because it is such an open platform and is so easy to use, it is entirely possible companies may try it and find out that it fits perfectly, with some minor modifications (which are easy, given WordPress’s open architecture).

Is it well suited for internal corporate blogging? Why or why not?

WordPress’s ability to meet a corporation’s internal needs will vary. However, because it is difficult to setup new blogs on an ongoing basis (unlike other systems you cannot simply point and click to create new blogs), it may not be the most appropriate solution for internal blogging.

What other blog platforms have you used that you can compare this to?

The first piece of blogging software I started using was b2, nearly two years ago. I spent three months with that blog and that blogging software before I burnt out. The reasons aren’t important, but basically boiled down to not properly defining the scope of my blog. The software was fairly difficult to work with, but was very easy to customize.

I knew that for my next blogging foray I wanted something more powerful. So, when I started Ensight, along with a group of friends, we decided to go with MovableType. It was easy to setup, had a large community and had a powerful templating component (at least, coming from b2 it did).

In addition, I’ve used a dozen more platforms (Drupal, Blogger, etc.) when guest blogging or helping others troubleshoot issues with their blogs. While I don’t necessarily consider myself an expert on every blogging platform, I am just about as much of a blogger as you can get, for good or for bad.

What else do we need to know about this system?

Some of WordPress’s other key features include:

Standards Oriented: The WordPress developers are committed to standards in all their forms, from the W3C’s (http://w3.org/) markup requirements to Trackback and Pingback. In addition, the WordPress developers have chosen to develop common API’s and an easy to use plugin architecture to allow others to work closely with the software without having to jump through any needless hoops.

Dynamic templates: I touched on this earlier. Essentially, having a dynamic templating system means that when you hit “save” on your blog post, it is live. When you make a change to the core templates driving your blog, it is live. No waiting around. No fussing. And definitely not mussing. Mussing is such a pain, and the WordPress developers have definitely made the templating system muss free.

Easy Importing: One of the biggest reasons for WordPress’s growth, besides WordPress itself, is that the development team have created importers for every major blogging platform out there, including Movable Type, Textpattern, Greymatter, Blogger, b2 and many others. If you are using a different platform, chances are someone from the community has either written an importer or they may even help write one for you.

In addition, the Plugin architecture is fantastic.

WordPress’s plugin system is incredibly simple: upload the plugin, login to your WordPress Control Panel, Navigate to the Plugins section and click Activate for the plugin you have just uploaded. Done. And if it doesn’t work as you’d hope, deactivate it.

If the plugin is for design changes, you may need to add a line of modular text (like the Calendar module I showed you in the Templates section), but for all other plugins, code changes are kept to an absolute minimum (which generally means you don’t have to do anything but Upload and Activate).
How many Plugins are there, and how do you find them? Your first stop should always be the Plugin page at the WordPress Wiki. It contains a list of more than a hundred plugins ranging from Per-Post Styles to the popular Auto Shutoff Comments Plugin. There are also plugins for photo galleries and a whole suite of other nifty blog tools.

If these aren’t enough, there are also “pure code” plugins, known in the WordPress community as Hacks. These will range from the mundane to the…odd (World Kit comes to mind).

What’s the Verdict?

Obviously I’m biased. I chose WordPress and I feel like I would never look back. While I’ve had issues, the amazing developers and fantastic support community have always been there to help me when I’ve needed it. For me, that has been extremely important. I never expect software to be perfect, but when the community helps me get it as close to perfect as I need it to be, that to me is a good sign.
Again, WordPress is open, flexible, dynamic and completely customizable. The template, posting, plugin and link management systems are world class. With some slight polishing of user permissions and comment spam blocking, WordPress could easily become the choice of just about every blogger out there. If these are the kinds of things you are looking for, WordPress is definitely for you.

UPDATE:
I asked the author to update this review with a few additional questions, which he graciously did:

Does it have a spell checker?

WordPress does not have a spellchecker as part of the software, however there are 2 spellcheck plugins that I am aware of, though I haven’t used either one.

Does it have a wiki-publishing component?

WordPress does not have a Wiki component.

Can you easily set up multiple weblogs from one account or instalation of the blog publishing software, or must you create multiple accounts or installations?

No, WordPress is currently a single-blog platform. There are several ways to get multiple blogs together on one blog site, however they require independent installations of WordPress.

Does it support categories? If so, how about hiearchical categories (e.g., Movies / Horror, Movies / Comedies, Movies / Thriller, Books / Fiction, Books / Biographies, and so on)? What about surpressed categories? (That is, in the monthly archive, publish all except the “Breaking News” category)?

WordPress supports categories, category descriptions and nested categories. I have tested it to 5 levels of depth, though I’m sure it goes much deeper than that. WordPress does not support the suppressing of categories, though there are several hacks and plugins that do accomplish this functionality.

Does it let you easily create a “remaindered links” blog-within-a-blog, a la Anil Dash’s Links Blog? (Obviously, you can kludge this in most systems, but I’m wondering if some blog software has it off the shelf.)

WordPress does not currently support a format like Link Blogs, however it does allow for the easy addition of links to the Link Management system. This feature is “kludgeable” by installing a separate version of WordPress or through several hacks and plugins.

This is a great one for the perennial question of how to make money off of blogs. Rather, actually, it’s an example of how a site with a solid revenue model already — e-commerce — can use blogs to make even more money. (NOTE: this case study from MarketingSherpa will be availabe for free for only a couple of weeks.)

The case study tells of how T-shirtKing.com increased its sales dramatically using a blog. The site was in the habit of writing long essays about the subjects of its t-shirts — for example, biographies on Miles Davis and Albert Einstein — for its email newsletter, which were quite popular with subscribers, but anti-spam filters were taking a toll on the effectiveness of its email program. So, using Movable Type, the site redesigned its site to publish via a blog, and added a blog to its content mix, publishing the essays in that format. The essays and the blog publishing platform worked well to drive more organic search traffic, and played into the site’s affiliate program as well. The results, according to MarketingSherpa, were dramatic:

Site sales tripled during 2003, and have continued strong in 2004. Altogether, blog content helps to bring in about 35% of total site sales — 10% from the email newsletter, 20% from affiliates who often reuse the content, and 5% from Blog traffic itself.
Blog readers are among the traffic most likely to convert to buyers. “Six to eight percent of Blog readers buy something. Once someone finds a Blog entry and reads the whole thing, they are about as qualified as you can get.”

MarketingSherpa: How to Build Your eRetail Business with a Blog (6-8% of Readers Convert to Buyers)

A blog for CEOs who blog. Why? Because they can.

Link

Gerrit Zalm

The Dutch Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Gerrit Zalm blogs. Needless to say, it’s in Dutch.

via Nevon

Link

Brilliant post by Maciej Ceglowski skewering audio posts for being pointlessly self-indulgent and missing most of what is great about both blogging and the Net in general. I agree with everything he says except that what makes his post so powerful is indeed that it is a very effective audio post. A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. I think the lesson is actually that, used judicioiusly, audio and video posts can indeed be effective, but only when they accomplish something that a normal text post cannot.

IdleWords.com: An Audioblogging Manifesto

Tom Humphrey, Nashville bureau chief for the Knoxville News Sentinel, is fumbling to get the hang of blogging at the Republican convention. Greg Brooks offers him some pointers, namely about the power of “decentralized editing” (my term). Amusing.

UPDATE:
James Lileks rips into this to hilarious effect (scroll past the stuff about Rudy G till after the pic of John McCain and Don Rickles).

It’s interesting for several reasons: 1. the site is described as a “web-only blog,” which of course makes it distinctive from blogs disseminated by carrier pigeon or smoke signals. 2. we learn that the bureau chief for a major newspaper has trouble writing clearly.

He goes on to mock the post sentence by sentence.

Greg Brooks: The Media Don’t Get It, Part MCMXXXII

Paul Chaney at Radiant Marketing suggests it’s time to retire the word “blog.” In his comments field I suggest “blog” isn’t so bad, or anyway “weblog” isn’t, and I also say that based on my PR background it’s too late to try to rebrand it anyway. Interesting reading, anyway.

Radiant Marketing: A Blog By Any Other Name

In my recent comment/rant on RSS replacing email, a folks have pointed out a recent wave of investment in RSS-related companies. So I thought I’d duly note this story for more details along those lines. Note that it mentions NewsGator got some funding, which I said in my post is my pick of the lot of RSS readers.

Wired: RSS Attracts Really Serious Money

Cindy Schmelky (not)

Yet another example (apparently) of a fake blog for a consumer product. Attention marketers: passing fake blogs off as real io LAAAAAME!!! You will get outed and look like asses.

I’ve said before I don’t mind fake blogs in some cases. I think the distinction is when they are obviously fake, or better yet admit to being fake or in some limited cases part of a publicity stunt (though, that model is growing old fast), they can sometimes be cool. But I can’t think of an exception when you are playing to your core audience pretending to be something you’re not (in this case, a 15-year-old girl) is not just piss-poor marketing likely to bite you in the ass. You’re playing your customers for fools. That is not cool.

Ringtonia has the scoop:

Cool Ringtones Blog which I’ve mentioned in Ringtonia before, is not like a initially thought, the blog of a teenager age who loves ringtones, but the business blog of Ringingphone.com, a provider of ringtones, wallpapers, online games…
Though the blog introduces Cindy Schmelky, 15, from Wayne, Penn with a picture and a quote “I love ringtones more than life”, she’s really just a figurehead for those articles as various members of the company’s team write them, according to Ringingphone co-owner Bob Bentz.
…
That a ringtone company has a blog is a great idea. But there is no need to mislead readers into thinking the blog is written by a 15 year-old, when it’s not.

All that said, naming the fake blogger “Cindy Schmelky” was a nice touch, as it doesn’t sound like the kind of name you’d come up with for a fake person. Her tagline ” I love ringtones more than life” is especially creepy.

UPDATE:
Check out the comments; a representative from Ringtones apologizes for the deceptive nature of the blog, saying they’ve learned their lesson and stopped faking the bloggers identity. Indeed, they still use the young woman’s photo, but they don’t pretend she’s a real person anymore. They simply refer to the blogger’s identity now as “The Staff at Cool Ringtones Blog.” Real names of those blogging would be a better improvement, but this is certainly something.

Link

Oh, this is rich. The latest example of someone getting fired for blogging comes from an employee of no less savvy socially networked company than Friendster (which, so far as I am aware, has no official blog of its own to address the controversy on; too bad, that). According to the blogger in question, Joyce Park, aka TroutGirl, the offending posts were both quite short and, to my outsider interpretation, fairly innocuous. I predict this is going to have a bad PR fallout for Friendster in the blogosphere.

UPDATE:
Ted Pibil notes in my comments thread on this post that Jon Udell has an excellent wrap up on this: Why we owe Troutgirl our thanks. Lots of good links there to add context and further the analysis of the implications of this. Thought it was worth highlighting here in the main post. Thanks Ted.

TroutGirl: Shitcanned

The guy behind this new service Blabble has been exchanging emails with me about this for more than a week, but so far I haven’t gotten beta access to it, so I can’t really determine how interesting it might be. He says it will target PR and marketing folks to help track trends as they emerge in the blogosphere. Obviously, it could be interesting in theory but it all depends on the execution.

Internet Retailer: Mining Blogs for Buzz, Blabble Automates the Search of Blog Content

A corporate blog is just like a personal blog, except you don’t get to use the word “motherfucker.”

— Mark Pilgrim

via BigBlogCompany

Dive Into Mark: Corporate Blogging

Check this out. Evil bastards.

PaidContent points out this story about the Miami Dolphins team inviting publishers of 14 fan web sites to a schmooze fest the hope will become an annual event known as Dolphins Web Weekend. Mentioned in the story are blog-like sites FinHeaven and Phinatics. Now that’s smart blog relations!

The Olympic organizers shoud take note of this (though something tells me that if the Chinese have anything to say about it in Beijing, we shouldn’t look for a much greater blog-friendly policy in four years).

Mercury News: Web Site Operators Get Royal Treatment From Dolphins

Scanning Userplane’s site, I honestly couldn’t tell you what the hell they do; something about Flash communication apps. A lot of marketing doubletalk, if you ask me. But they blog, which we like. Here’s the “About Us” boilerplate from a recent press release; maybe you can make heads or tails of it:

Userplane is a pioneer in offering Flash-based Web applications that support live text and audio/video communication. Based in Los Angeles, the company is an innovator in enterprise community messaging that enables a broad range of Web sites to run branded communication applications. Using Macromedia’s Flash Communication Server MX technology, Userplane Apps are deployed internationally on sites ranging from online communities to intranets. The application suite reaches tens of millions of users and supports over a million live conversations a month. Userplane continues to provide forward-thinking Web and software development for industry-leading clients including Red Bull, Honda, 1-800 Flowers, and Juicy Couture.

Link

50 highly subjective points, several amusing, a few actually valuable.

Simon World: Everything You Wanted to Know About Blogging but Were Afraid to Ask

Weird photo that
Steve Jurvetson
uses on his blog

A few weeks ago, I wrote that high-profile venture capitalist Tim Draper was blogging. Looking back at that site, I’m not sure it’s really a blog at all. He’s an author on Always-On, and it’s really hard to call things on that site blogs, as their system is kind of retarded.

Regardless, his colleague Steve Jurvetson, of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, is now blogging, and there’s no doubt it’s a real blog: it’s hosted on Blogspot, after all.

Link

Pete Blackshaw

A couple of weeks ago I noted that Intelliseek, which produces the blog intelligence applications BlogPulse, was hosting a seminar on the topic of business blogs. Apparently they thought it would be a good idea to put their money where their mouth is and start a blog of their own to keep up the momentum on the topic. The blog is written by Pete Blackshaw, the company’s chief marketing officer.

Meanwhile, Intelliseek just introduced an new analytics feature to BlogPulse. The press release reports:

The new blog analytics capability is designed to help marketers and brand managers track, measure and analyze information from nearly two million blogs a day – information posted and shared by influential, active online consumers and opinion shapers.

Link

A few months ago, I wrote about the Red Hat World Tour Blog. That apparently worked so well for the Linux services company that they now have a series of blogs, including an Executive Blog. It caught my eye that the first post there is from Michael Tiemann, VP of Open Source Affairs. I wonder if he’s any relations to former NYC mayor Daniel Tiemann for whom the tiny street I live on was named.

Link

In interesting advertising-supported blog. From their press release:

CoolBusinessIdeas.com, a Singapore-based business intelligence company which publishes a free, monthly e-newsletter that collects new, promising business ideas and innovations globally, has expanded its audience to cater to an international audience. CoolBusinessIdeas.com has also built its new website around an open blog.

Link