Okay so you may have heard that WordPress has recently partnered with Sphere.com which provides possibly related blog posts which have been blogged elsewhere on wordpress.com. Now I’m fine with that and I have no quarms with wordpress/sphere making money from me (they host my blogs! - which is expensive) but what I think is totally inappropriate is the fact that this new feature was automatically turned on and when I went to a blog post on my site for some contact details I saw the links one titled: “The Great Porn Debate” which incidently isn’t rude (far from it) but I don’t want that sort of stuff showing up on my blog (as I’m sure you understand), I’ve now disabled the feature (go to Design > Extras to disable it) but still I think WordPress should announce these changes to the users and ask them do you want this feature turned on or off?
I think this sort of behavior is typical for “web 2.0″ companies, who implement a feature without a concern for the user base, however WordPress needs to realise that they can’t just do that or users will move to other blogging services (and there are plenty of them).
We’ll have a way to filter out specific blogs soon, so you’ll be able to customize and tweak the results on your blog.
As to why it’s on by default, it has to do with the way it’s used - links are shown from other people who have the feature turned on. If it starts out with 0 users, then there are no results, and we believed the majority of WP users would enjoy the additional traffic and links from the feature, and thus far they have.
But we made it an option because it might not be right for everybody.
So true mate. I’ve had my thoughts about this pour out last night: http://sterex.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/wordpresscom-whats-happening/
Matt, I don’t think you’ve really understood, All I’m saying is that it would be nice to be informed about new features instead of just finding out about them by accident, why not give me a notice of the new feature when I login and then have the option of turning on/off there and then.