WordPress News Roundup October 2005: Akismet Launches as Matt Mullenweg Leaves CNET

October 2005 was one of the most important months in WordPress history, though there was no new release. Matt Mullenweg left his job at CNET to work on WordPress and its related services full time, and days later he launched Akismet, the anti-spam service that would protect a large share of the world’s blogs. Around WordPress, big companies were buying blogging businesses.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

• AOL buys Weblogs, Inc.: On October 6 AOL agreed to acquire Weblogs, Inc., Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey’s blog network behind Engadget and Autoblog. The price was widely reported at around $25 million but was never officially confirmed.
• VeriSign buys Weblogs.com: Dave Winer sold the Weblogs.com ping service to VeriSign. Mullenweg wrote that he was uneasy about the deal. With blo.gs already sold to Yahoo, Ping-O-Matic was now the only large independent ping relay.

WordPress Core Updates

No release came out in October. WordPress 1.5.2 remained current, and the next major version was in alpha in Subversion.

Other WordPress News

• Akismet launches: On October 25 Mullenweg announced Akismet, a web service that checked comments and trackbacks against a shared spam database. It was available immediately as a WordPress plugin, with an API other systems could use. He said it was one of the most rewarding things he had worked on, because it gave people back time they had been spending on spam.
• Leaving CNET: On October 20 Mullenweg announced that he had given notice at CNET, where he had worked for about a year, so he could spend his days on WordPress and the projects around it. The company he was building around WordPress.com and Akismet would be introduced as Automattic in December.
• Flock and WordPress.com: Users of Flock, a new “social” web browser, could sign up for WordPress.com without an invitation.
• Web 2.0 Conference: Mullenweg took part in a workshop on open-source infrastructure at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. He had not been able to afford to attend the year before.
• Codex blocked in China: Support forum users reported that the WordPress Codex was blocked in China.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

There were no WordPress security releases in October. Akismet was the security-adjacent news. Instead of each blog defending itself with local rules, every Akismet user contributed to and benefited from a shared view of spam, so the service got better as more people used it.

Industry Trends and Insights

AOL’s purchase showed that professional blog networks had become media assets, and newer networks were increasingly building on WordPress. Mullenweg observed that older networks tended to run Movable Type while the new ones he saw used WordPress or their own software. MySQL 5.0 reached general availability late in the month, and WordPress 2.0.1 would soon include fixes for its strict mode.

Theme of the Month: K2

K2, developed by Michael Heilemann and Chris J. Davis as a successor to Kubrick, was becoming a favourite of bloggers who wanted features without coding. It included Ajax-powered touches and support for plugins such as Ultimate Tag Warrior, and many people used it as a framework for their own designs.

Plugin of the Month: Akismet

Akismet was the clear pick. Within weeks reviewers were reporting that it caught almost all the spam they received. It would be bundled with WordPress 2.0 at the end of the year and stayed in the default download for many years after.

Founder of the Month: Matt Mullenweg

Leaving CNET was the moment Matt Mullenweg, then 21, committed fully to WordPress. Akismet, launched the same week, showed the model he would follow: give the core software away and fund development through services. That approach became the basis of Automattic.

Looking Ahead to November 2005

With Mullenweg now full time on WordPress, attention turned to finishing the next major release, still labelled 1.6 in development, and to growing WordPress.com and Akismet beyond their early adopters.