twigged.net

So the Web 2.0 bubble has long since burst and we’re floating around in no-mans-land trying to get on with life without a label - I know, it’s tough, but I assure life will go on regardless. Some are still eager to latch onto the Web 2.0 nomenclature, predicting that web 3.0 will be (is) less about ubiquitous social networks and more about the individual: you won’t go to them, they will come to you.

And while the superfluous start-ups that still teethe on the Web 2.0 nipple watch their raison d’être slowly decline, there are certain staples to this web junkie diet that remain strong. Wordpress is one of them. Why? Well part of the reason lies in the fact that unlike many of the other start-ups it has always been Open Source and despite all the postulating on the ethical validity of Open Source software (OSS) - issues to do with quality benchmarks, licensing and peer review structures - there’s one thing we cannot take away from it: it’s free. Any OSS that’s able to bridge the gap between the ‘digerati’ and the ‘cyber peasant’ is likely to be the next best thing.

But with Wordpress you get the feeling that we’ve been so busy binging on the Open Source bottle, so caught up in a heady haze of free themes and plugins, that we’re only just starting to wake up to the reality of financial exploitation that has set in. It’s no longer just a peripheral annoyance, greed has begun to penetrate the Wordpress core; and it’s most unabated manifestation is in the ongoing ‘premium’ theme trend.

Not only is the term ‘premium’ questionable in that it suggests adherence to a standard of excellence when there is none, but it also suggests that free themes are of lesser quality. In many cases they probably are, but in many other cases they are clearly not. See Arun Kale, Natalie Jost, Evan Eckard, Ed Merritt and Design Disease for examples. But really we’re just grating at the surface, because beneath is a world teeming with these ‘little fellas’, Piranhas spearheading a deceptive usurper model that lets the whole OSS show down. It goes something like this:

set up a blog > design free themes > gain traffic and notoriety > introduce ‘premium’ themes > make some quick cash > later on down the line look back and wonder why…

In many cases the creators of free themes start out on an altruistic path, honouring the Wordpress maxim of being ‘free and priceless’ and contribute to furthering the knowledge and development of the Wordpress blogging platform. But before long ,notoriety based on good will alone no longer suffices, they have their cake and they want to eat it. The introductory paragraph to Wordpress.org’s welcome section tells us that ‘WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability [...] WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.’ With this scourge of the premium Wordpress theme, the premium plugin and other such paid services, I’m beginning to think this statement needs to undergo some drastic revision, and I haven’t even begun to discuss Wordpress.com and Mullenweg’s theme marketplace…