This week Joe Wilcox at BetaNews hit Techmeme with news that a mere fraction of the millions of potential Spaces migrations might actually happen, as many Spaces blogs haven’t been kept current, and Microsoft played a bit of a game with its “30 million users” number. What they actually said was that Spaces receives some 30 million visitors/month, to some 7 million Spaces blogs. Wilcox quoted an anonymous Microsoft source as saying that “Spaces is dead”, and that few blogs were actually active. A couple of thoughts on that: first, of course, we said that four months ago!, and second, it seems to us to be less a matter of how many Spaces blogs migrate over, than the newly acquired ability for Windows Live users to now create a modern WordPress blog, actively promoted by WordPress.com, if not Windows Live.
Wilcox did quote Paul Kim from Automattic, WordPress.com’s parent company:
After I posted, Paul Kim, Automattic’s vice president of user growth, responded: "We don’t have an exact estimate for how many Spaces bloggers will move over to WordPress.com in the next 6 months, but in the first 48 hours we’ve completed close to 50,000 migrations which is very promising." That number is impressive enough. Real measure will be the next 48 hours or 48 days.
While we’re on the subject, our own migration is progressing. We decided to move from the multiple blog structure we’ve had in Community server to a single blog with multiple categories: our blogs have become WP categories, and our CS categories are now WP tags. This meant a fair bit of sometimes tedious conversion, but it’s all done now, we have a working shell of a site (locked down at the moment, we’ll let you in soon), and a large bit of the work behind us.
Dealing with images is our next task, as CS uses a unique and proprietary method of storing blog post images. We’ll be extracting the images out of that file structure, and modifying the posts database to point to their new location, lots of fun! Nice to have some MVPs in the wings to help us out here and there, but we’re making progress.
Then we’ll need to reroute some ID numbers to get our Disqus comments all lined up, and damaster is already moving our FAQs Plus pages over, along with the About page, etc.
One note: other than the (19!) authors on LiveSide, we won’t be migrating any user profiles over (if you’ve made comments over the years, they made the trip, and we’ll look at migrating them into Disqus). In truth, your user profile on the web has evolved since we started LiveSide, and your Windows Live profile, Twitter account, Facebook profile, Linked-In page, and Disqus profile are all better places to store and share your profile information than locked into a website. Profiles have been shut down at LiveSide for over a year, but just wanted to let you know they won’t be continued.