open-source blogging

Microsoft launches open-source blogging platform

On Monday, Microsoft launched Oxite, an open-source blogging platform.

However, the software maker was quick to underline that the product is aimed at developers and not intended to directly compete with popular blogging software such as WordPress or Movable Type.

Microsoft posted the Oxite code on its CodePlex Web site on Friday and made an official announcement on Monday. The software, described as an alpha release, is available under the Microsoft Public License, one of Microsoft's OSI-certified open-source licenses.

Oxite is a standards-compliant, extensible content-management system designed to support either blogs or larger Web sites, Microsoft said. The platform … Read more

Open source drives Wordpress to 6.5 billion page views

Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg recently delivered a "state of the nation" address at WordCamp, Wordpress' user and developer conference. It turns out that open source can be very good for business. Very, very good.

Consider this growth at Wordpress:

Page views grew from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion/month 1/3 of the page views come from VIPs like CNN and LOLCats 120-160 million global unique visitors per month Two million new blogs created for the year 35 million new blog posts (up from 20 million) Wordpress is an open-source blogging platform at its heart. The Wordpress.org project is actively developed by Automattic, the company behind Wordpress, but also by the community, which joint collaboration results in new features rolling out on a daily basis. Wordpress.com then takes these improvements and packages them for the masses:

Am I bats? Part 2

I don't know about you, but there was a lot of excitement at the Tiemann household when this image popped up on the screen. It meant that nights of field work, evenings of programming, and a weekend of multimedia production all pointed at one, inescapable conclusion: my crazy bat project was a SUCCESS and the promise I made to my daughter was KEPT!!

First things first. If you have been following this blog, you know that a week ago I had the crazy idea of trying to record bats. After finally having an opportunity to use my aforementioned SONY PMC-D1, and after spending another few hours trying to convince myself I had captured something, in the end I felt a bit like one of the members of the Warren Commission looking at the Zapruder film and asking "you want me to make a finding based on this?" If I was going to convince my daughter that we had, in fact, captured and identified bat sounds beyond a shadow of a doubt, it was going to take more than a few suspicious noises of post-processed audio before I could be satisfied that the burden of proof could be met. In the days after my first blog posting, things were looking fairly bleak for the project, but I was determined to prove that with a little technology (a little more than you might suspect), I could, in fact, make good.… Read more

Check out Matt Asay on the CNET Blog Network

CNET's Blog Network features blogs written by industry leaders, pundits, and experts who share a passion for technology. The Open Road by Matt Asay, a veteran of the open source world, will be posting about emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. So far, he's weighed in on MySQL's scaling abilities, Linus Torvald's issues with Free Software foundation and the link between digital music and open source attitudes, among other topics.

Check out The Open Road here.