Move Along Now… Nothing To See

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Matt has responded, Google have reinstated wordpress.org in their indexes.

The whole thing has been blown way out of proportion. Some real worms have crawled out of the woodwork and shown their true colours. Which is to say, they are incapable of making sound judgements of their own based on real, verifiable evidence. Instead they rely on the inflammatory language in sounds bites from other ill informed sources and react unthinkingly. And some of those are professional journalists!

Anyway move along now… there’s nothing to see… be on your way…

Google Marches On

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Speaking of Google…
I had noticed over the last couple of days that Google had started pre-fetching search results or rather, enabling your browser to do that. Of course this only works with newer browsers that support this feature (not Internet Explorer!). I see that the knee-jerk-reactionists over at slashdot are predicting death and disaster. Google (and Mozilla), of course, tell you exactly how to disable it should you wish to do so. Mozilla’s FAQ entry is on-line too.

I also noticed this morning that I am now using 246 MB (20%) of your 1243 1286 1289 1300 MB. on Gmail. That’s an unusual number! I wonder where that came from. It looks suspiciously like 1000MB more than the space I was using yesterday! Could they, would they, have simply added 1000MB to whatever storage everyone was already using? Presumably in response to Yahoo’s decision to provide 1GB of storage. But they’ve not doubled They are doubling it like some speculated.

Update: Weird! The space available keeps growing!

Update: As Serge points out in comments, The Gmail What’s new page now has info on this. They are doubling the storage. They’ve also announced the ‘richtext’ support I had noticed in the compose pane.

Hysterics, Pedantics, and Knee Jerk reactions

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This is the geek pedant in me speaking now: wordpress.org is not the same as WordPress the blogging software, and it is not the same as the tens of thousands of WordPress blogs out there. Which means that headlines like Slashdot’s WordPress Banned by Google for Spamming really annoy me. That should be WordPress.org Banned by Google for Scamming Adsense.

Creating link farms, chains of self-referencing websites, cross linking, and some of the other things that people do to game the search engines and in this case profit from ad placements is wrong, no doubt, but it is not spamming. Spamming has always meant sending out unsolicited content, whether by news posting, email, or blog and guest book comments.

What Matt has allowed to take place on his server, has nothing to do with any of those things. Google have rightly pulled those pages from their index because their terms and conditions state: No Google ad may be placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads, whether or not the page content is relevant.. Nothing whatsoever to do with spamming.

The only mention of spamming in those terms and conditions is … In particular, avoid links to web spammers…. These articles didn’t have links to anywhere (as far as I remember), they were purely designed to attract high paying Google ads and thus click-throughs to legitimate Google advertisers!

The things people are positing about Google ‘having it in for’ WordPress because of Blogger or about everyone else’s WordPress blogs somehow being affected by this, are just nonsense. Get a grip people! Stick to the facts.

Matt, WordPress, and Search Engine Gaming

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Update:
Everyone, Please understand that this not about WordPress the software, or WordPress developers, or even WordPress Inc. It is about Matt Mullenweg allowing someone else to game Google’s search engine on the WordPress.org site.

I feel I have to comment on the current WordPress story building over the ‘discovery’ that Matt has been using the wordpress.org domain to host thousands of specially-written articles designed to attract high paying Google Adsense adverts, and their outgoing links gaining high page rank from WordPress.org’s own page rank.
Dougal Campbell has written a reasoned response to the story breaking. It is most unfortunate that Matt is currently on vacation in Europe, but Jonas has replied quite reasonable. Jonas is also saying he will answer anyone’s questions 24×7 which is most generous of him.
I will also quote Andrew’s opening disclaimer:

Disclaimer. I’m hesitant to even write about this, knowing the web’s fondness for angry mob justice, but I feel like it’s an important issue that needs to be addressed. My one request: please be calm and rational. WordPress is a great project, and Matt is a good guy. Think before piling on the hatemail and flames.

I suspect that Matt is now aware of the situation as the pages seemed to have disappeared, or else someone trusted has taken them down.

It’s worth noting that Matt already responded to a query on the support forums about this in February saying:

The content in /articles is essentially advertising by a third party that we host for a flat fee. I’m not sure if we’re going to continue it much longer, but we’re committed to this month at least, it was basically an experiment. However around the beginning of February donations were going down as expenses were ramping up, so it seemed like a good way to cover everything. The Adsense on those pages is not ours and I have no idea what they get on it, we just get a flat fee. The money is used just like donations but more specifically it’s been going to the business/trademark expenses so it’s not entirely out of my pocket anymore.

My opinion? I say, let’s not make a mountain out of a mole hill till we have all the facts. It sounds very much like Matt has made dubious decision for all the right reasons. But I believe the only thing one can consider Matt may have done wrong here is hosting these articles on wordpress.org. Hosting them at all I don’t have a problem with: It is one way that could be used to help pay for the enormous hosting costs he must have. There are articles out there explaining exactly how to do this on your own site.

Matt has my support, he has done a huge amount for this project. Far, far more than I have. I hope he can sort this one without to much fallout. The fact that he has already been open about it stands in his favour.

update:As Dr Dave pointed out in the comments, Matt didn’t respond to the forum post until Andy said he was going public with the story. I will still support Matt, but I think he really has been very silly to get involved in this and to tie it in to wordpress.org

UPA North 2

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The second meeting of UPA North took place last night at Cafe Muse in the Manchester Museum. It wasn’t as well attended as the first meeting in January, but there were some familiar faces as well as some new; Hi Roy!.

I arrived early and grabbed myself a sandwich and coffee before wandering around to shake a few familiar hands and say ‘Hi’ to some new faces. People continued to drift in for the next half an hour or so.

Dave Hawdale kicked of the meeting giving us some interesting and occasionally amusing ‘internet’ related facts from recent news, before introducing the nights guest speaker: Louise Ferguson.

Louise introduced herself and her subject ‘Ethnography’. Her talk was very interesting, if a little rushed. It was clear she had a lot more to say on the subject than time allowed. I felt she could have got some of her points across more easily with concrete examples, but she seemed determined to skirt around job specifics and client details. Louise finished with a brief question and answer session.

After another ‘shameless self-promotion’ session (which I bottled again!), Dave gave a round-up and mentioned some ideas for the next couple of meetings. He is trying to arrange a couple of speakers on Accessibility which should be very interesting.

Afterwards a small group of us retired to Kro Bar where we all chatted about all kinds of stuff; from music and record collections, to the Semantic Web and social software, to museum exhibits, categorization, folksonomies, and more. Talking to Louise, it sounds like there are some interesting things afoot, UK-centered for a change.

I think everyone gained something positive from the night. Some useful contacts were made and even some tentative agreements made for the future.

100,000

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It seems numbers are the flavour of the week: WordPress recently passed 100,000 downloads. That’s a huge number! I would like to think that no less than half those people actually got as far as installing it and trying it. Certainly judging by the number of hits I get on my site from brand new blogs that ‘s not far off.
Matt and some friends had a little party to celebrate. Congratulations guys.