From the press release:

Socialtext, the first Wiki company, releases Socialtext Open at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). Available for immediate download, Socialtext Open is the first open source wiki with a commercial venture as its primary contributor. Over 2,000 businesses run Socialtext Wiki products today as a hosted service or appliance.

Based on the same great product, Socialtext Open is released under a standard open source license, and contains all of Socialtext’s enterprise grade code aside from enterprise management and enterprise integration tools. Socialtext also announced the availability of its Technical Professional Service, a new SOAP API and the Socialtext Open Roadmap for the next three months.

See the Socialtext blog. (Disclosure: Today’s announcement makes me proud to be an advisor to Socialtext. (Note: I had no part in the strategy.))

Technorati, to whom I’m also an advisor, has launched a big bucket of new features. I particularly like the search refinement tool. And they do a nice job when you look up your own blog. Under the surface, Technorati is making it easier for partners to use its data, which is good all around.

I’m not nearly as enthusiastic about the new design of the home page. The personalization helps, but it’s difficult to tell that it’s a site for searching through 50M blogs. Instead, it looks like it wants to be a media site that shows you “what everyone is blogging about.” The site’s focus on what bloggers with “authority” care about over-emphasizes the “short head” at the expense of the long tail. So, nope, I’m not a fan of that part of the makeover.

Past the home page, some of the the new stuff is both cool and useful…the best sort of tech. [Tags: wikis socialtext open_source technorati]

Categories: misc dw