I raised a few eyebrows (trust me, I have a few) when Om Malik launched the Earth2Tech blog, though in all fairness, the topic is certainly in vogue.
But today, when I found out that Malik’s latest blog network was launching Ostatic - a blog to cover Open Source projects - it took all of 4 seconds to realize this was actually going to serve a major niche… until I realized, OS is certainly no longer niche.
Across Mojo Supreme, we’re knee deep in OS:
- blogs: all on Wordpress.
- CMS: Typo3
- video player: blip.tv, which itself is built on an open source flash player.
Our entire infrastructure is built on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP), too.
According to Tech Crunch:
GigaOm (Om Malik’s blog network) just launched a new open source software focused blog called Ostatic. The goal, Malik said today in an interview, is to track news around the world’s 150,000+ open source projects.
Malik quotes IDC, saying that 71% of the worlds developers have used open source software, and that 50% of organizations have some open source software in production. This is, of course, big business - MySQL was recently acquired by Sun for $1 billion, for example.
The Ostatic blog is really just a wrapper for additional services. The site will also have a directory with key information on each project, including alternatives and links to documentation, forums, mailings lists and the source code itself. Initial data in the director has been added from outsourced writers in India. Going forward, projects can send updates and new content to the site, or add it themselves.
The directory portion of Ostatic is competitive with a number of existing services, including SourceForge, which tracks 170,000 or so projects.
To see where Tech Crunch and Giga Om fit in the landscape of the 8 leading Tech-Oriented Blog Networks, click here.
And for many more OS blogs:
TheOpenForce, Tecosystems, CBR Open Source Weblog, rand($thoughts), Mitchell’s Blog, Law & Life: Silicon Valley, and The Open Road.
Subscribe:
March 4th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
my comments on Om’s blog:
http://www.joshuazeidner.com/2008/03/ohloh-om-malik-starts-open-source-blog.html