While reading the Mex Blog and Der Schockwellenreiter I strumbled upon an interesting tidbit concerning „WordPress“. This open-source project is common knowledge for all blog hosters and users, especially for the users if they start their own independent blog on their private server. But what most of them don’t know is simple: Each „powered by WordPress“ found within the blogs increases the PageRank for the official WordPress website at Google and any other search engine. Here’s an excerpt from the original article at Waxy.org:

The Problem. WordPress is a very popular open-source blogging software package, with a great official website maintained by Matt Mullenweg, its founding developer. I discovered last week that since early February, he’s been quietly hosting at least 120,000 168,000 articles on their website. These articles are designed specifically to game the Google Adwords program, written by a third-party about high-cost advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages. (Update: Google is actively removing every article from their results, but here’s a saved copy of the first page of results. You can still view about 25,000 results on Yahoo. Or try this search tool, which searches multiple Google datacenters.)

Furthermore, the author questions the idea of how to use and recieve earnings for the open-source projects / foundations. This is some quite interesting issue since „everybody“ or „the community“ is contributing their own input to the developers and registrars of these foundations to create these software programs.

I recently noticed that the Blogspirit communities I’ve created in the past (Blogosphere, Student Life and Media-Zone) are getting filled with entries which might not find a focus in the community as the topic and thematic environment of the community differ greatly from the author’s contributions. To avoid this possible misconception of communities, I suggest to enable the creators of the community to add a small description for each community which will be listed on the main community page where all blogs are summarized, and on the page of the admin interface where you join a community. On the other hand, I know that communities are quite capable of developing itself into any possible direction. Perhaps I’m all alone with this idea…

I found a few things on Blogspirit which disturbed me in a minor case, so it’s not a biggie. I’m simply going to list them all up and let our Tag–Team decide on what to do next… ;)

• The old communities don’t have Trackbacks listed in the major overview compared to more recent additions – probably a template update is necessary.
• The Trackbacks aren’t summed up in the main admin interface page, currently I have 118 comments in total, but the „All comments“ page lists 124 comments (including the remaining 6 Trackbacks).
• Once the blog’s category pages grow too large, a limitation of i.e. 15 articles per category page with the option to visit the next/previous page of each category might help to limit the endless scrolling.
• A list of every blog at Blogspirit with the most recent updates (chronologically listed) might help to find even those blogs that post only once or twice a week but contain interesting information such as Middle Manager’s Heaven or it might help to find dead blogs easier than visiting them manually or checking all subscribed feeds in your RSS aggregator software.