I received an email the other day from Hilary McCarthy promoting Platformic.  Platformic is an online Web CMS or what her company likes to call an Online Web Develop Environment.  As usual, I'll let the email do most of the talking in this post.

Hi, I wanted to make sure that you saw that Platformic is announcing version 3.0 of its enterprise web development software, an end-to-end online web development environment and content management platform that allows businesses to quickly and easily build/update websites in real-time without sacrificing creativity or writing code (http://www.prweb.com/releases/platformic... ).

The only content management system (CMS) on the market with a built-in point-and-click mechanism for building layouts visually, Platformic removes the need to hard-code websites or use Adobe Dreamweaver or any other third-party web authoring tools, enabling even individuals in the organization without technical expertise to make changes. The new version capitalizes on Platformic's ability to simplify web development and management with its browser-based building capability and cascading style sheet (CSS) template generation tool that automatically and visually writes fully validated, nested CSS Div structures through a point-and-click architecture. More info, including a link to a demo, follows...

It looks as if Laura Scott, pingVision, had some free time on her hands. There are reasons free servcies on the Internet are free. Laura wants you to start asking yourself, "why?".

Is the future really free?

It seems we've entered an age where there's a land-grab happening for personal data and attention time. Look at all the web start-ups backed by venture capital. They aren't investing out of philanthropy. There's value there. YouTube is "free" but Google paid over a billion dollars for it. Why?

Here's a hint: It's not about the Tube. [Read more at Laura Scott's Blog]

Personally, I'll need to read her post a few times and soak in on the information from her excerpts. Some things to think about...

Last December, I mentioned my excitement about Drupal's project lead, Dries Buytaert, along with Jay Batson starting a company called Acquia. While it was known that the $7 million startup would focus on Drupal for the enterprise, what was not known was the products and services that would be offered by the company. In a press release today, Acquia finally unveiled its roadmap to commercially support Drupal.

The company announced the two initial products and services it will be offering, Carbon and Spokes. Carbon is Acquia's commercial supported version of Drupal which will focus on social publishing applications. Spokes is an update will be an enhanced update notification sercice that provides "site owners personalized alerts with actionable recommendations". At this time I'm, not clear as to whether Spokes will be available for just Carbon or for all Drupal distributions. Both services will be available through a subscription offering.

Matt Mullenweg announced this morning that Wordpress.com users will now have 3 GB of free drive space for their blogs. Previously, Wordpress.com only offered 50 MB of free space to those that signed up for the free service. Why are they doing this? Looks like Wordpress.com has no longer decided to play nice guy against their biggest competitors, TypePad and Blogger.

The following is an excerpt from Mullenweg's announcement at Wordpress.com:

Today, one of those developments comes to fruition — everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. To get the same amount of space at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year. Blogger only gives you 1GB. We’re doing the same thing for free.

Our hope is that much in the same way Gmail
transformed the way people think about email, we’ll give people the
freedom to blog rich media without having to worry about how many
kilobytes are left in their upload space.

I can almost guess how Google-owned Blogger will respond (add more GB), but TypePad may be another story.  It seems to me, if TypePad still wants to charge for its Basic service...they now have to work a lot harder at it.

"WordPress.com appears to have grown by 523% with 24,393,457 visits. WordPress doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon and thats some positive news."

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Collaboration.  Everyone wants to do it better.  Collaboration.  Everyone wants to find that perfect online tool which can support needed communication necessary for good collaboration .  Collaboration.  Every company in the business wants to provide you their tool to help you make collaboration work for you.

Perhaps ReviewBasics might be just the communication tool you're looking for to meet your collaboration requirements.  Tim Shih, SharpStyle Labs, has been wanting me to take a look at their collaboration feedback tool, ReviewBasics.   Mr. Shih writes:

ReviewBasics is a collaboration feedback gathering platform which allows professionals across many industries to exchange ideas, gather thoughts, and review various types of creative, interactive, motion, and written content. We take a familiar, paper-based content review process and bring it online. Please visit our website at www.reviewbasics.com and you can demo our features.

Check out the “Demo” link on our homepage. This link lets you directly try out our images, website, documents, and video review technology. With ReviewBasics, designers, photographers, bloggers, and business professionals can utilize our technology and gather feedback from peers to improve work products.

So I finally took some time to take a look at SharpStyle Lab's new product which is currently in beta.  ReviewBasics allows for feedback on four types of "content pages": websites, images, documents and  videos.  The solutions the application are intended to provide are for creative and design, opinion research, film and video, and legal.

At first I was skeptical that this article was without bias regarding Wordpress.com since it was Matt Mullenweg's own blog that referred me to the story.  I was pleased to find that the author, Jonathan Bailey, helped erased my skepticism in his well written article, Wordpress.com is Virtually Spam Free.  The first two paragraphs should get you interested in reading more.

A recent study by WebmasterWorld found that an estimated 77% of all blogs on Google’s Blogspot service were spam. Similarly, AOL Hometown, had well over 80% of its results turn out to be spam. Even MSN Spaces, which as not mentioned in the report, is claimed to host an estimated ten percent of spammer Web site.

It seems as if nearly every major free blog hosting service has been either overrun or nearly overrun with spam. However, one services stands alone, a relative oasis of spam cleanliness, Automattic’s Wordpress.com. Despite being just as free as its competitors and placing few restrictions on registration, Wordpress.com has not endured the spam avalanche that other services have.

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