Changing Way

Acquia was started up by Dries Buytaert, the lead developer of the Drupal CMS, in late 2007. At the time I remarked on the similarities between Acquia and Automattic.

Now that Dries has announced Mollom, there’s a new and significant similarity. Mollom, like Automattic’s Akismet, is a spam-fighting web service. Duncan at TechCrunch reports that Akismet is the current market leader.

Here are a couple of ways in which Mollom is following the leader. In each case, the server code is closed-source, even though it comes from a firm notable for its foundations in open source. In each case, the spam-fighting service can be invoked by any client using the API: Mollom isn’t just for Drupal, any more than Akismet is just for WordPress. One of the main differences is that Mollom uses captcha, albeit only when it’s unsure whether it’s just bitten on spam or ham.

Meanwhile, Six Apart has made an acquisition that expands its range beyond blogging, albeit into a closely related domain. Mike Arrington posted a guest the acquired firm contest on Friday. It now has almost 400 comments: that guy really knows how to get his audience going.

It turns out that Six Apart acquired Apperceptive. Here’s how Rafat Ali described the deal.

SixApart, the blogging software firm with products like MovableType, Typepad and Vox, is now moving up the value chain into offering advertising and consulting services, and has bought New York City-based social media creative agency, Apperceptive. The financial details were not disclosed.

In case you, like me, were wondering what “social media creative agency” means, it seems to be how they say “ad network” on the mean streets of New York.

That choice was the theme of a talk recently given at a conference in San Francisco. You can see a video of the talk at the blog of either of the presenters. Andy uses Blogger, Selena uses WordPress. I found the video via Kieran, who uses Drupal.

Here’s my summary of the 18-minute video.

• Preamble. We’re not trying to pick a winner, but to highlight the differences between D and W.
• Getting site started: W+.
• Managing site as it grows more complex: D+.
• What does the software want to do with data? D: whatever you like. W: publish it.
• Who’s the focus of the community? D: developers. W: users.
• Wrapup.

Yesterday, Om Malik announced Ostatic, the newest member of the GigaOm family of blogs. Here’s how editor Sam Dean introduced the site: “OStatic’s mission is to be the most comprehensive web destination for information and insight on open source software and services.”

Mike Arrington asked, is Ostatic built on open source? The answer is yes: it’s built on the Drupal platform. I think that it’s the first of the GigaOm properties not to be built on WordPress.

I can see two reasons to use Drupal, rather than WordPress, for OStatic. First, the site, including much of the content, was developed by Vox Holdings, rather than by GigaOm, so the GigaOm preference for WordPress wasn’t as strong a factor as it might have been.

Second, Ostatic differs from existing GigaOm sites in that it’s more than a blog. It includes a database of open-source projects. Hence Drupal, a content management system (CMS), may well have been considered a better fit than WordPress, which is more of a blogging system with some CMS-like features.

I certainly don’t think that Om’s choice of Drupal for OStatic reflects any lack of confidence in WordPress, or any lack of open-source-ness on the part of WordPress. WordPress (like Drupal) is under the GPL.

I wish all the best to Om and to OStatic, even as I disagree with his description of it as a blog - it’s more than that, in so represents a bigger step for GigaOm than might at first appear.

After posting thoughts on LJ, it occurred to me that few of the blogs to which I subscribe are on LJ. The only two that occur to me are science-fiction-related. One is the group blog theinferior4+1. The other is Nicholas Whyte’s From the Heart of Europe, which has a fair amount of personal and political content as well as the sf.

I think that Universal Hub is the sole Drupal representative in my feed reader. I have recently found myself at another Drupal-powered site: Green Plastic, a site dedicated to Radiohead. The most recent post there is two weeks old: Anyone out there familiar with Drupal? If you can help, please email us.

Most of the sites to which I subscribe are powered by one of: WordPress, Movable Type, TypePad, Blogger. The order is some kind of approximation to the representation each has in my subscriptions.

Acquia is a startup that will provide complements to Drupal. Drupal, in turn, is a content management platform supporting a variety of web sites from personal blogs on up. Drupal is free/open source software, released under the GPL.

One of the questions in the Acquia FAQ is: “Are there other open source companies that Acquia is modeled after?” Part of the answer provided is that: “Just like Red Hat, Acquia’s business model is based on an existing open source project with a broad base of existing GPL’d open source code.”

Acquia strikes me as rather similar to Automattic. Drupal, like WordPress, is a GPL’d platform on which blogs and other “social web” sites can be built. The lead developer of Drupal, Dries Buytaert, will be the CTO of Acquia; Matt Mullenweg is in effect CTO is Automattic. Each firm has an experienced CEO who sold his previous firm.

Of course, there are also many differences between Acquia and Automattic. Acquia has started with rather more venture capital: $7 million, as opposed to the million or so with which Automattic got under way.

If the name Acquia makes you think of a series of map-in-front fantasy novels (The Annals of Acquia?), then check out Mark Hopkins’ post at Mashable. “Only a few days ago did Dries Buytaert,” he starts, and goes on to remark that Drupal “has grown to no small respectability.”