You could almost see this coming. The response from the Performancing community was pretty hostile toward Nick Wilson when the deal with Pay Per Post was announced.

The credibility that Nick had built up over the past year or so through Performancing was directly attacked, and perhaps the only way to salvage that was to walk away from the deal.

I’m not a bandwagon hopper, so I’ve got no beef with Pay Per Post. Blogosphere, big place. Opportunities plenty. That sort of thing.

It’s good to see that Metrics will have a new lease of life as an Open Source product, and perhaps we’ll see some nice new developments. I’d suggested a couple to Nick a while back, like making the URLs in reports more readable instead of truncating them.

I’ve never been a big fan of the Performancing For FireFox blog editor that they released (now ScribeFire), and their advertising system has yet to yield any big rewards for me so far. Metrics also failed to hit the spot, except the useful AdSense clicks chart.

Anyway, the big point of interest is that both companies seem to have listened to feedback and reacted accordingly. Whether PPP can claw any kind of good reputation from the blogosphere is anyone’s guess, though I suspect Nick’s status will be relatively unscathed thanks to this latest move.

It had to happen. The clever folks at Pligg have spun off a content management system that mimics Digg, the popular social bookmarking service.

Now everybody can have their own version of Digg!

I’m pretty sure a Digg-clone won’t work on every website, but it might be useful as a forum replacement where users can submit stories as discussion points. The SEOmoz crew wrote about Pligg the other day and pointed to a few examples of sites which use the Pligg platform.

Actually, it might even be useful for those bloggers who blog snippets of stories with a link back to source. Just a great way to rapidly post content with the added benefit of the voting element thrown in. Whatever, it may be worth a look.

If anyone’s given Pligg a try, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

And while we’re on the subject of Digg, my Digg profile is GerryBot. Do feel free to friend me…

Ever since discovering the Performancing website for bloggers, I’ve had an itching to test out Drupal. To date, I’ve been a WordPress-only blogger, and very loathe to try any other blogging/content management systems.

When Performancing came along, they had an intriguing use of Drupal, both as a forum and to allow their members to blog on the site. I thought (and still think) that this use of a CMS is a fantastic way to build a community driven website. In fact, I’m planning to create a community-driven website using Drupal soon, so that’ll be an interesting experiment.

I’m currently building a Drupal site at my personal domain, which will be explicitly for testing purposes. I’ll do a bit of blogging there, create some content and allow visitors to sign up and join in discussions, etc.

I also came across a site by a guy called Nick Lewis, who among other things writes with authority on the subject of Drupal and how to customise your installation. I’ll be referring back to Nick’s site quite a bit (hopefully) and also writing about my experiences with Drupal here.

Finally! I just noticed this evening that Google has introduced a delete button on the interface. No more irritating drop-down menu!

Just in case our grandchildren fail to realise - this was possibly the single biggest interface omission made by the Gmail developers! To have to select (or view) an email and then drop down a menu and click Delete was a serious pain in the ass!

I’m going to bed now. Happy.

Gotta love this. Two juicy Google-related pieces out over the last couple of days:

• Via Paul Stamatiou, TechCrunch is carrying screenshots of the new Google Calendar application, provisionally known as CL2.
• Now, Google have bought Writely, the web-based word processor. Shrewd move, Writely is a very popular Web 2.0 app. Nothing I’d like more than to log on to it with my Google account details.

Now, is it just me, or does this lend serious weight to the argument that Google is planning it’s own OS? Let’s face it, with Gmail, a calender application and now a word processor, all they need now is a spreadsheet program and something to manage tasks and that’s Microsoft Office effectively replaced.

And guess what, interoperability issues (in documents) would fly out the window, because everyone would be using (X)HTML. And platform would be irrelevant, because it runs via your browser! Of course, you’d be completely screwed if you ever lost your Internet connection…..

I’m not going to go down the “Microsoft should be quaking in their boots” route, but since Office is a bread and butter product for Microsoft, an essentially free alternative via the web is an attractive proposition. It might also be attractive to those millions out there currently using hacked versions of Office!