Something foul in wordpress land
The creator of Wordpress is apparently using the pagerank gained from every wordpress site linking to wordpress.org to game adwords by having thousands of unrelated articles cloaked on the site:
http://www.waxy.org/archive/2005/03/30/wordpres.shtml
I can’t blame the guy for trying to make some money off of his wildly successful software, but this is the sort of thing that really ought to be disclosed to the community of people putting in their work for free.
Also, it raises the question (and I have no reason to believe that it’s the case) – “if the leader of this project thinks it’s a good idea to host a link farm, what other surprises may be lurking in the code?” It’s a GPL project, so of course, you can check the source code. But it’s a blow to think that you have to check for something that was widely considered a community-based project.
March 31st, 2005 at 1:54 pm
The metafilter thread on the topic has some interesting followup to this, including this particularly hypocritical remark made by the leader of the Wordpress project.