A View on View :: Cash for Six Apart; Woes for Wordpress

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the blog - examines the world of telecom and technology from a distinctly Canadian perspective.

the person - lives in Toronto, CA with his wife and three children, and works as director of community with PlanetEye Inc.

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Cash for Six Apart; Woes for Wordpress

by Mark Evans on Mon 20 Feb 2006 08:04 AM EST | Permanent Link

There's lot of chatter about Six Apart raising $12-million with lots of VCs salivating over the deal. Is this bubble-like activity? Maybe but at least Six Apart has a service, plenty of users, and a well-known brand. In other words, it's a real business as opposed to an ideas being chased by VCs worried about missing out of the Web 2.0 bonanza. Om Malik wonders about the exit strategy. While IPOs are rare these days, I think he makes a mistake in dismissing Yahoo because Six Apart had a pre-deal valuation of $80-million. Companies like Six Apart, Technorati, deli.icio.us and Memeorandum are being viewed as strategic assets, which means their "value" tends to as much as about brand, users and the role within a portfolio as it does about dollars and cents. In an ideal world, it would interesting to see a merger between Six Apart (the leading blogging platform), Technorati (the leading blog search engine) and FeedBurner (the leading blog-vertising player). It's probably unlikely but a nice thought. In terms of other blog platforms, I wonder how long Wordpress will carry on with getting an injection of cash. As much as Wordpress has cache, it likely needs money to support its growth. I've got a couple Wordpress blogs and one of them All Nortel, All the Time (a hosted version) crapped out this morning. Not good. Not happy.

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Re: Cash for Six Apart; Woes for Wordpress

by Tris Hussey on Mon 20 Feb 2006 01:55 PM EST | Profile | Permanent Link

Mark, Matt Mullenweg has always hinted that he has something up his sleeve for money. I think Automattic is going to fund Wordpress, which is different than SA and FB because it is open source and community platform.

So ... I wouldn't fret about WP yet ... the multi-user version holds tremendous promise.

Re: Re: Cash for Six Apart; Woes for Wordpress

by Mark Evans on Mon 20 Feb 2006 04:38 PM EST | Profile | Permanent Link

i know matt's got a lot on his plate but the hosted version of wordpress needs some more love. i'm particularly keen about the ability to add features such as mybloglog. as it now stands, there's little flexibility for outside services to be added.

Re: Re: Re: Cash for Six Apart; Woes for Wordpress

by Tris Hussey on Mon 20 Feb 2006 04:44 PM EST | Profile | Permanent Link

I agree Mark ... I'd really like to be about to tweak my template and such.

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\n"; #File retrieval failed - exiting function pass back old values. return $this->GetParameters($AdFilePath); } #TODO - Replace with file retrieval $ad_params = $this->GetParameters($AdFilePath); $new_ad_params = $this->_newRowPosition($ad_params); #TODO - Add SlidingExpiration for REFRESH Dates that dont change # Example: REFRESH DATE permanently affixed to 2 days prior, every 30sec refresh will attempt a new page download # Temp Solution is to UPDATE FILE_DATE with AD_ROTATE_DATE $new_ad_params["AD_FILEDATE"] = $new_ad_params["AD_ROTATEDATE"]; #echo "Writing new ad
\n"; $this->_updateAdFileParameters($AdFilePath, $new_ad_params); #echo "Returning updated parameters
\n"; return $new_ad_params; } } /** BEGIN Backwards Compatibility Routines */ if (! function_exists('array_combine')) { function array_combine($keys, $values) { foreach($keys as $key) $out[$key] = array_shift($values); return $out; } } if (!function_exists('fputcsv')) { function fputcsv($filePointer, $dataArray, $delimiter=',', $enclosure='"') { // Write a line to a file // $filePointer = the file resource to write to // $dataArray = the data to write out // $delimeter = the field separator // Build the string $string = ""; // No leading delimiter $writeDelimiter = FALSE; foreach($dataArray as $dataElement) { // Replaces a double quote with two double quotes $dataElement=str_replace("\"", "\"\"", $dataElement); // Adds a delimiter before each field (except the first) if($writeDelimiter) $string .= $delimiter; // Encloses each field with $enclosure and adds it to the string $string .= $enclosure . $dataElement . $enclosure; // Delimiters are used every time except the first. $writeDelimiter = TRUE; } // end foreach($dataArray as $dataElement) // Append new line $string .= "\n"; // Write the string to the file return fwrite($filePointer,$string); } } if (!function_exists('fgetcsv')) { #TODO - Remove or ??? #Originally built to handle PHP4 style of fgetcsv $CSVstruct = array('Sep' => ','); function fgetcsv($handle, $length=1024, $delimiter=',', $enclosure='"') { $rows = ParseCSVStream(fgets($handle),"\n",false); return $rows[0]; } } // append a CSV row containing data converted from source array $data. Actual conversion is done by ExCSVRowWalker() function AppendCSVRow($data) { global $CSVstruct; array_walk($data,'ExCSVRowWalker'.($CSVstruct['OutEOL']=="\n"?'N':'')); $CSVstruct['File'] .= implode($CSVstruct['Sep'],$data).$CSVstruct['OutEOL']; } // returns an array of rows (each row being an array of columns) with parsed data. Returns false when conversion fails. Auto-detects Win/Mac/*nix newline characters, which are converted all to the sequence specified (defaults to $CSVstruct['OutEOL']) for your convenience. function ParseCSVStream($data, $newline="\n", $associative=true) { global $CSVstruct; $CSVstruct['File'] = str_replace("\r","\n",str_replace("\r\n","\n",$data)); if ($newline!="\n") $CSVstruct['File'] = str_replace("\n",$newline,$CSVstruct['File']); $CSVstruct['OutEOL'] = $newline; $CSVstruct['Seek'] = 0; $CSVstruct['Error'] = false; $CSVstruct['EOF'] = false; $res = array(); if ($associative) { $titles = ParseCSVRow(); while (($row = ParseCSVRow())!==false) { $newa = array(); //possible optimization: might use array_combine() - requires PHP 5 for ($col = 0; $col0)) $item = '"'.str_replace('"','""',str_replace($CSVstruct['OutEOL'],"\n",$item)).'"'; } function ExCSVRowWalkerN(&$item) { if (!is_numeric($item)&&(strlen($item)>0)) $item = '"'.str_replace('"','""',$item).'"'; } // read next line from buffer. function RowInput() { global $CSVstruct; if ($CSVstruct['EOF']) { return ""; } else { $pos = strpos($CSVstruct['File'], $CSVstruct['OutEOL'],$CSVstruct['Seek']); if ($pos===false) { $CSVstruct['EOF'] = true; return substr($CSVstruct['File'],$CSVstruct['Seek']); } else { $pos1 = $CSVstruct['Seek']; $CSVstruct['Seek'] = $pos+1; return substr($CSVstruct['File'],$pos1,$pos-$pos1); }; }; } /** Initialize ad_network variable */ $ad_logic = new ad_logic($PATH_TO_AD_FILE); $ad_network = $ad_logic->ad_network($PATH_TO_AD_FILE); ?>