As we draw to the end of the zeroes (sounds so much better than naughties surely?), this blog is counting down the ‘PR and the Social Web’ top ten wonders of the internet, brought to us over the last ten years. No place here for the likes of Amazon or Google which appeared in the nineties. So in reverse order….
Number 10: WordPress
‘Blogger’ would have been in the running if it had launched six months later but the original blogging platform was a product of the nineties, just. It is highly arguable that ‘WordPress’ is also the better bet. The templates look better and it feels more accessible and straightforward to use, though admittedly less popular (it sits at number 20 on Alexa.com with Blogger currently at number 6). Blogging platforms have been instrumental from redistributing publishing power from the few to the many. User generated content and web 2.0 apre products of the blogging revolution. The social web has WordPress at its heart.
It isn’t just the ‘have a go’ bloggers that use WordPress (this site is built with WordPress.com using a standard themed template), many major organisations use a wordpress platform because it is both robust and easy to work with. CNN, Techcrunch, The New York Times and Le Monde all use the WordPress platform as does Playstation and Ben & Jerry’s.
WordPress was launched in 2003 with less than twenty users it is now used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are people all over the world work on it and everything from the support documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. It also means it is free to use. As it says on the site Code is Poetry.
PR and the Social Web 