If you didn’t know about 30 days ago Wordpress Team released Multi User version of their popular Blogging software, Wordpress MU.
Today I got my self thinking of starting my own blogging community based on this software and then it hit me! if I am thinking that so will thousends of other people around the net. I slapped myself and started thinking about the future of blogging communities… Call me paranoid but I think release of free publicly available Blogging Community software will dramaticly reduce general quality.
From the top of my mind I can think of several down sides of this:
- Dramatic quality reduction
- Dramatic spam growth
- Security
- Possible SE penalties for decent bloggers
and only two good things: More Competition and Comfort for those who need multi blogs out of the box (large companies for example).
First good thing is somewhat inaccurate since we have so many of Free blogging communities.
In rest of this article I will focus on downsides and elaborate a bit more on them.
Spam growth and quality reduction are very closely tied. We are all aware of Adsense blog, this type of software will help these kind of bloggers to gain much more power of spam blog posts. Recently on Digg you could all see worpress plugin called “Digg Dugg” (there are tons of similar content ripping plugins), now imagine what would happen if spammers integrate this plugin (or something similar) to Wordpress MU. I agree that it was possible to generate large amount of spam blogs and rip content before but now! now it’s Free and widely available.
Based on this Google, Yahoo and others will probably need to organize better defence against this kind of spam. This could lead to SERP penalties for some or few decent bloggers.
Final thing is Security. Right now we have large amount of Blogging communities with good (mostly) in-house software solutions. In-house solutions give way more guarantee for users private data security. With release of Free and Widely available software members of these communities will face a problem. Owners will mostly be people who just installed and redesigned it and don’t have any clue about what the heck is inside the box they just opened.
I would really like to hear your opinions on this topic. So Good or Bad and why?
November 29th, 2006 at 12:23 pm
I don’t think it will be any different from the use of phpBB as a social tool. It will have the exact same problems.
The only drawback is that WordpressMU does not have all the adminstration tasks that it needs built in. Using it for thousands of users with only one admin would be a nightmare.