Blogging and Social Media Platforms: Does the Future Belong to Open Source?

Selecting a platform for your blogging and social media efforts is a high-stakes process. Choose the right software and you’ll have a significant edge over your competitors and reap huge dividends from network effects. Choose wrong and you may find yourself in a technological dead end and be forced — at great expense — to start over.

The open architecture of the World Wide Web obliterated closed networks like Prodigy and Compuserve, while a diminished AOL was forced to migrate largely to a role of Internet access provider. Conversely, Windows remains supremely dominant on corporate desktops while Linux has been unable to expand much beyond it’s role as a server platform.

As companies large and small rush to embrace the world of social media, it’s critical that they understand the issues of control, lock-in, and extensibility that they will face long-term. In his keynote, WordPress founder and creator Matt Mullenweg will explain the evolution of open source, and show how participation in open source user and developer communities offers all businesses an upside that he feels far outweighs the risks.