Another reason is my feeling that there is probably a better way to keep track of WPMU sites than this blog or, indeed, any blog. I’m currently trying out BricaBox. To see what BricaBox is all about, check out the video (less than 2 minutes) currently at the site’s front page, or the post at my main blog.

Here’s the WPMU Sites BricaBox. After creating it, I entered two WPMU sites: Edublogs, kind host of this very blog, and WordPress.com. I just added all the WPMU sites that are new since I last updated the list in the sidebar of this blog. If BricaBox seems like an appropriate tool, I’ll look in to exporting the list from this blog and bulk loading in to BricaBox.

What do you think? If you’re having trouble using comments on this blog, as I currently am, you can leave a comment @changingway or email me there (andrew@).

Thank you for your patience and attention.

WordPress.com recently became an OpenID producer. Here’s the announcement post. Here’s one of my posts on the news, and here’s another. Here’s the WordPress.com FAQ on OpenID.

And, to finally get to the part that’s relevant to WPMU:we’re going to release the MU plugin, says Matt.

The main section of the sidebar comprises links to WPMU hosts. I just added eight new links.

So, any rumors of the death of this blog were exaggerated. (By the way, Mark Twain would have been an all-time great blogger.) Rumors of birth, on the other hand, remain delightfully true.

To summarize, the typical WPMU admin runs his site more for social than for economic reasons, was already familiar with WP when he chose WPMU, likes the fact that WPMU is free (as in speech and as in beer), and funds the sites out of his own pocket.

Reponses on how the site is hosted are more mixed, with just over half of the admins hosting their own sites, rather than purchasing server capacity. If you’re interested in further detail, there’s the above link, then there’s Comments in this blog, or email.

If I had to describe a typical WPMU admin, it would be as follows: male, childless, partnered, born and currently living in the USA, with a technical occupation and some college education. I’ve ordered the attributes in descending order of overwhelmingness; 27/30 respondents were male, there was a lot of variation in level of formal education.

Since there was a lot of variation in response to most of the demographic questions, those interested enough to read this post probably want to see a fuller account.

Of the 30 respondents, 13 did not consider any other software. I infer from this that these people would not have set up their blog sites were it not for the availability of WPMU.

So 17/30 did consider at least one other software option. The options mentioned more than once are as follows:

• Drupal (5)
• b2evolution (3)
• WordPress (2)
• Lyceum (2)
• TypePad (2)

It’s interesting that three of these five blogging tools are WordPress-related. The other two are the free/open-source Drupal and the proprietary TypePad.

One aspect of this question is: are WPMU admins hackers? The following three survey items are particularly relevant to this more specific question.

• I believe that software should be free/open source, as opposed to proprietary. (Yes/No question, included as a potential reason for choosing WPMU.)
• What changes, if any, have you made to the WPMU code?
• Do you contribute code to any free/open source software projects?

If a WPMU admin was an archetypal hacker, he would believe that software should be F/OS, would have hacked the source code, and would have contributed code to F/OS projects (and would be male).

I count an admin as a hacker if his responses to two of the three questions were in line with the hacker archetype. The second and third questions are open-ended, and so required some judgment in assessing the hacker-ness of responses. For example, if an admin seemed to have made just enough changes to the WPMU source in order to get his site running, I considered this to be site admin, rather than hacking.

The 30 WPMU admins who responded to the survey are split exactly 15/15 between hackers and non-hackers.

Update: The first comment, from Andrea, raises an issue I should have addressed in this post in the first place. It relates the ambiguity of the term hacker, which I’ve linked to its Wikipedia entry so that you can see this ambiguity. I was using the term in the positive sense in which it is usually used in free/open source software circles.

Analysis of the Like responses shows that the most popular thing about WPMU was that it is WordPress. Admins were also pleased that WPMU is user-friendly, extensible, and open-source.

Analysis of the Dislike (actually, like least) responses shows that the least popular thing about WPMU was the quality of the code. There were also concerns about support, or the lack thereof. The specific aspect most often singled out was the way in which WPMU uses the database.

You can see more details here.

I will post results as I go through the responses. I’ll start by posting about responses to the “What do you like most/least about WPMU” questions. That post will appear here a few minutes after the current post. It will include a link to a Writely document providing further detail.

Over the next few weeks, I will write a paper, probably for First Monday, about the survey. If you would be willing to give thoughtful comments on drafts of the paper, please let me know by email (andrew dot watson at yahoo dot youknowtherest) or by commenting here.

A couple of questions, about delicious rather than about WPMU.

• Is there a way of asking delicious for the unbroken sites only? I’d like to ask it for wpmu+host-broken, where “-” is a minus sign. I guess I could tag the unbroken sites with unbroken, but that’s rather clumsy.
• Do any of the many other social bookmarking services allow me to do what I ask for above?