Mediaboss Marketing

Blogs have come a long way in the last 10 years. The concept has evolved from teenagers reliving their angst-filled days on LiveJournal to the medium through which we now consume almost all content on the Internet. But, as is so often the case after years of incremental iteration: Innovation has all but ceased. Today, we find ourselves on the edge of the next big content revolution, because the truth is that--at present--online publishing is being pretty harshly neglected.

Before we can look at why, first we need to rewind a little. In early 2003, a rambunctious teenager named Matt Mullenweg was blogging every day about his life in college. His page consisted mainly of photos of himself, the girls he was evidently pursuing, and some very vague ideas about optimizing his life. It was a typical blog, but it was important to him--and that's what really counts. (Below, Matt Mullenweg circa 2003.)

Where Matt differed from most teenagers was that he had a keen interest in the politics of software licensing. Matt supported Open Source, free software that he believed was important to the Internet. So he didn't use LiveJournal or TextPattern--the most popular options at the time--he used a less known, smaller blogging platform called b2. After a while, though, b2 fell into disrepair and its creator was notable primarily by his absence. Matt threw around the idea of taking over the project for a while, and eventually this lead to him taking b2's files and renaming the project "WordPress."[1]

A few weeks ago WordPress celebrated its 10th birthday. It now powers roughly 20% of all websites which exist on the Internet. The success of WordPress is unquestionable, but there are signs that history is repeating itself once more in 2013.

When WordPress was first released, it was a blogging platform. It existed for the same reason as LiveJournal, but the difference was that it was Open Source, allowing you to host a blog on your own domain--a valuable distinction. Over the years people started using WordPress not just to build blogs, but to build entire websites. Good website content management software was hard to find, and while a blogging platform wasn't technically the right tool for the job, it was oftentimes a far easier one to work with than the alternatives.

So, as user and developer demand grew, WordPress began its long transition from blog to content management system. It wasn't an easy transition, and to this day, WordPress still tries to make sure everyone knows it's "not just for blogs" as it truly has grown into so much more.

And yet, it somehow feels like we're back in 2003 again. Publishing on the web is in a state of complete disrepair.

While WordPress hasn't fallen into disrepair, it's a far cry from what it once was. Mullenwegs company, Automattic, with some $81 million of investment, is trying to re-invent WordPress.com to be something used to create websites for restaurants, schools, and musicians. Meanwhile, the lead developers for the WordPress software are building incredible things like multi-site functionality and custom content types... but not a single one of them actually maintains an active blog[2].

There is no longer such a strong notion that WordPress is "just a blogging platform, because it's actually no longer a blogging platform at all. Matt Mullenweg himself now says that the future of WordPress is as a "web operating system."

The state of online publishing is clear. All around us we see new platforms popping up, growing, and trying to fill the very large shoes which WordPress has left behind. These are all proprietary products with closed licenses that exist--like LiveJournal and TextPattern did--to make their companies wealthy.

See the original post:
Who Will Pick Up Where WordPress Left Off?