Misplaced Blame
Steve Ruebel notes a New York Times report that Gawker Media is trimming it portfolio and laying off some bloggers. CEO and founder Nick Denton addresses the moves here.
Their properties have generally devolved into too much gossip and sensationalism that I'm not too surprised. Denton's reasoning is sound business though. Honestly I'm a bit surprised to have seen how Gawker Media has ballooned from the early days when he evangelized the concept of nanopublishing and a bare-bones editorial operation when the company launched. Seems to me Gawker has progressed far beyond that.
I digress though. That wasn't the reason for my post. It was this line in Nick's post:
The open-source publishing systems, upon which most weblogs depend, cannot handle larger and more sophisticated sites.
What complete and total rubbish!
Let's begin with the low-hanging misinformation in that sentence: Movable Type has never been an open source publishing tool. It's code is accessible to users however open source implies free and with few limitations.
The other piece of misinformation is that Movable Type cannot be used for high-volume sites like theirs. MT can absolutely be effective running high-volume sites -- that is IF it is deployed properly. Gawker's setup though is a case study in what not to do with MT.
I've done a bit of work for Gawker in the past so I have some knowledge of this setup and I know a number of others who are even more familiar with it. One former Gawker staffer and I were discussing another post Nick made when they likened Gawker's system to buying an expensive sports car then jabbing the tires with a switchblade and then saying "this sucks" when it does not drive right. It sounds humorous, but quite true in this case.
While I could bore you with the details I won't. The real point here is that being able to make any system to scale to handle load or volume takes care, planning and expertise -- it is not a simple out of the box thing. You can't do anything to a software system and expect it to just perform much like a sports car with its tires slashed.
MT is not without its warts and powering sites with the size or volume of Gawker could be better addressed, but Denton's assertions are misplaced at best.
