Quite frankly though, I’m amazed that the service has lasted this long. Twitter appears to lack a viable business model, and each time you update your status it could be sending that out, via SMS, to tens, hundreds or even thousands of recipients. Even if Twitter received a small amount for each incoming SMS, this would be dwarfed by the number of outgoing messages. The more popular Twitter gets, the more they will lose. The sensible option would be to charge users for receiving texts—which is fairly simple to do—but it looks like the site is run by a bunch of techies who have been blinded into thinking that providing a service which costs money to run without a long-term source of revenue is somehow a good idea. Then again, they’re running a Web 2.0 site, where having basic accountancy skills on your CV will ensure that you never get hired.

From a personal perspective, I’m actually quite pleased to see this happening. Over the past couple of years, I’ve seen companies pour millions of dollars into these web 2.0 companies, which have produced virtually no returns and are an appalling waste of capital which could be put to far better use elsewhere. Perhaps now investors will look again at opportunities to “invest” in companies like Twitter, Facebook et al and see them for what they really are—a highly speculative bet on the success of a company with no assets, no business model and virtually no revenue.

Phishing relies upon the fact that it doesn’t matter if only one in ten thousand people are completely lacking in common sense (given the University’s size, it’s probably actually more like one in five thousand)—spam enough of them and you’ll eventually get some hits. It amazes me that people still fall for this trick, because to me it seems so painstakingly obvious that a bank would never ask for information such as your PIN, but it would appear that the message has still not got through to everyone.

I’ve been looking for a half-decent content management system for some time, as until now I’ve been writing my own code for each site that I run (Game Demos is just one example of this). This is a real pain, as I never have the time to write an admin interface—and therefore end up using phpMyAdmin—and I’m not as good as designing interfaces as other people. However, I have thought several times about using WordPress as a content management system—even though it started as a blogging platform—which is why the above article is particularly of interest to me.

Reasons why I would consider using WordPress as a CMS:

• Spam protection: Akismet is by far the most effective anti-spam solution I’ve come across, it probably performs better on blog comments than SpamAssassin does on my email. Sure, there are plugins available for several other systems, but with WordPress the support is practically built-in. Yes, it is technically a plugin, but it comes shipped with the distribution, so there’s one less step to mess around with.
• Familiarity: I use WordPress on several other blogs, including Rogue Tory and Politics Watch, so I’m comfortable with the interface and the way the software does things. In a similar vein, readers of my sites/blogs are also more likely to be familiar with the commenting interface for WordPress than for other content management systems.
• Theme availability: WordPress seems to have more themes available for it than any other blog or content management system I’ve seen. You can download thousands of free themes, pay less than $100 for an off-the-shelf professionally designed theme, or cough up for a designer to create a unique theme especially for your site—there are plenty of companies and individuals around who offer this service. What’s more, WordPress themes can be made—one of my major bugbears with Drupal is that all of the themes tend to look like Drupal sites.
• Plugins: Like themes, there are thousands of plugins available, enabling pretty much anything you could possibly want to do with WordPress—from formatting posts with Textile to cross-posting to other sites (e.g. LiveJournal) automatically. I’m not aware of any other system with the same variety of plugins (though Drupal probably comes a close second), and I suspect this is largely due to the ease of creating and installing plugins for WordPress.

I don’t have much time at the moment to play around with WordPress, as I’m busy writing up my MPhil thesis, but once that’s out of the way I think I will give it a whirl on Politics Watch as an experiment and see how far I get.

At present, the organisation seems to be doing a lot of good work on a very small budget. The only thing that worries me at the moment is that ORG gets their office space for free. Whilst this is obviously a fine thing in theory as it saves the organisation a significant amount of money which can be spent on forwarding the aims of the group, it does raise the possibility that they could be kicked out of their office at short notice and forced to find somewhere else.

I personally don’t support the Open Rights Group at the moment, because environmental organisations seem to sweep up most of my spare funds, but if you have a fiver a month to spare and want to see your digital rights protected, then you should sign up to support ORG now. Just one minor note though, if at all possible you should setup a standing order rather than a PayPal subscription, otherwise a proportion of your donation goes towards propping up a credit institution in Luxembourg.

Other people supporting the Open Rights Group

• John Leach