Better remove those wordpress.de links
Rober Scoble wrote about how to respond to criticism today. I don’t know how wordpress.com company Automattic and their new employee Olaf A. Schmitz (swiss guy) - former wordpress.de founder and owner - will reply to the cricism blowing in their faces these days through the german blogosphere.
The short story: wordpress.de was _the_ (one and only) german WP website ever, owned by Olaf A. Schmitz - a single person. It had a forum, hosted the download of the german language version of WP and had lot’s of other tools. (Ping-Service, Blogmap and stuff).
Through the last months domains changed. Lot’s of services have beed redirected to wordpress-germany.org (what a domain nam whooo!) but no one talked about it. During the last days suddenly the ownership for wordpress.de changed from Olaf to Automattic Inc - the company of WP founder Matt Mullenweg - owner of wordpress.com hosting service. From one day to the other the domain was redirected to wordpress.com taking all the thousands of Links to wordpress.de with them (wordpress.de has a Google Pagerank 7/10).
That’s how automattic and Olaf made the german blogosphere angry these days. Not the fact they’re going to offer free bloghosting on the domain but the fact they took a community built linkability (through years thinking the project is open source) to a commercial company and not talking about it.g
guys: Talk about it - communicate open and honestly.
Matt said,
December 19, 2006 @ 4:15 am
Hey, I’m sorry. We’ve been talking about this for months and our team had assumed that it was being communicated to the .de open source community as well. The plan from the beginning was simply to model what has worked great for WordPress.org and .com, and recreate it in languages where we’re seeing a ton of demand.
It has nothing to do with pagerank or links, in fact the front page of WP.com is a PR9 so a PR7 (which even my own blog is higher than) definitely isn’t what we’re after.