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.

"Declan McCullagh over at News.com, has written up a fine piece that discusses the genesis of the new journalist bill approved by Congress earlier this week. And while McCullagh can walk you through the travels this bill has made for approval, I want to discuss why this bill is a load of crap."

Complete Story

This is a fantastic article found on ZDNet UK not only about open source content management systems but the issues that traditional publishers are now facing in either competing or adopting with today's Web CMS.  The article is written by Mike Barrett and is titled, "CMS evolution, publishing revolution?".  The author writes:

Mainstream content management systems are only now starting to provide similar flexibility for publishers. Open source products such as Drupal and Joomla now offer a viable way for smaller businesses to get on line effectively. Like the blogging platforms [Wordpress and Blogger] they introduce the opportunity to create multiple sites, cost effectively, by re-using functionality, content and platforms. But how many publishers are actually taking advantage of this? Often, even where publishers have multiple sites, many are still designed and built in isolation from their stablemates as businesses fail to understand the benefits of one platform.

Why don't the traditional media just migrate over to open source CMS?  Don't forget that when many of the publishers first put their CMS online several years ago...propriety was still king.