Coredump

A tasteless April Fool’s joke or the real McCoy? This article bares how Wordpress did it.

A couple of interesting issues crop up:

• Since Google introduced its AdSense program, blogging, for some, has become a means to earn dollars. Not really unethical, but rigging Google to boost one’s page rank is, for me, a bit questionable.
• The Wordpress excuse of the proceeds going to supporting the open-source project — thus benefitting the community — is just pretty hard to swallow, no matter how much sweetener you add to it.
• What does this say about the business model of open-source projects in general? Of course, funding can be an issue, especially if there’s a dearth of volunteers to do worthwhile deeds. But gaming search engines to up the revenues? *shrugs*
• And this, coming from one of the proponents of the fight against search engine spams (the <rel="nofollow">)? Ironic, isn’t it?

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