Tag: readwriteweb

WordPress Turns 10, and…

Happy 10th birthday, WordPress! And same to you, ReadWrite! Here are a couple of “open letters” celebrating WordPress’s 10th: fanmail on RW; and a love letter from Matt Mullenweg to his baby, now all grown up.

10 years ago (according to my memory, and the rather more reliable Wikipedia):

  • WordPress was Matt (and Mike Little)’s transformation of the open source b2/cafelog software.
  • RW was Read/Write Web, which was Richard MacManus. It’s one of those blogs that was started by an excellent writer, who I sometimes selfishly wish was still the main writer, and mainly writing).
  • I was living in Boston, and had no kids and no blogs.

Since then, WordPress has grown in ways too numerous to mention here and RW has long been a media property or suchlike. I am now in in the DC area, and have two kids, one of whom is nearly as old as WP and RWW.

Here’s to further good decades for WP, RW, me – and you, dear reader(s).

ReadWriteWeb Acquired By SAY Media

In the years I’ve been blogging about social media, even before we thought that Web 2.0 was a cool and cutting-edge term, ReadWriteWeb has been among the feeds I follow. So I knew (or at least emailed and otherwise interacted with) Richard MacManus when he was an ambitious and hardworking blogger. I continued to follow RWW as it became a new media property (whatever that means) and added staff, such as Marshall Kirkpatrick.

I’ll continue to follow RWW as it moves into the third stage. Having been a blog and a media property, it’s now part of a media empire. RWW has been acquired by SAY Media.

Richard, sincere congratulations. I hope that this is a very profitable event financially. I also hope that it is not an exit from RWW for you as a blogger.

ReadWriteWeb is 5

On April 20, 2003, Richard MacManus posted about Read/Write Web. As he kept on doing so, ReadWriteWeb became one of the best ongoing accounts on what’s going on with Web 2.0.

Happy birthday to RWW and congratulations to Richard and the other people involved with its success. I enjoyed today’s celebratory post. I will disagree with one of the things that Richard says in it, though. I don’t think that RWW “has retained the same essential character and ‘voice’ that it had.” It can’t, since most of RWW is now written by people other than Richard.

RWW is no longer the blog written by Richard. It is the publication run by Richard. It’s still excellent, but in a rather different way.

Anyway, congratulations to Richard on his healthy 5 year old kid.

LiveJournal Strike

I saw Lucius’ post on the LiveJournal strike just before the 24-hour content strike started.

For 24 hours, we will not post or comment to LJ. Not in our own journals, not in communities. Not publicly, privately, or under friends-lock.

Why? Because the new owners of LJ said they were going to listen to a user driven advisory board before making any changes, and didn’t. They instead tried to take away all GLBT related interest groups, and were about to take away all free, ad free accounts as well and make LJ paid.

I expected to see the story show up on the web-focused blogs to which I subscribe. These blogs had been impressed with the makeup of LJ’s advisory board. For example, Marshall at RWW described the board as “filled with awesomeness.”

The new Board is made up of an all-star cast. Copyright and corruption fighter Larry Lessig, tech pioneer Esther Dyson and brilliant social network analyst danah boyd make up the group, along with Brad Fitzpatrick, whose work has been key in the development of LiveJournal itself, OpenID, social graph theory and the Google-led OpenSocial. That’s hot.

Right now, RWW seems like the blog that didn’t bite on the strike. I hope to see coverage on the strike story soon from RWW – and from TechCrunch, Mashable, etc.