As someone who’s written about digital share cropping before, I’m actually really hopeful about WordPress.com‘s Jetpack plugin.

[ I’ve decided to give WordPress a spin because, after years of shying away from it for security reasons, I’ve realised that it probably does a lot more good than bad for the health of the web. Also, like Magento, it seems probable that much of its negative rep comes from middling-quality third party plug-ins, and not the core experience. ]

In a way, WordPress has always lead the way, with Automattic services like Gravatar and Akismet – providing centralisation where it makes sense, but making those strengths available to millions of distributed blogs.

Jetpack takes this even further, integrating the fairly slick statistics, notifications and monitoring that WordPress.com blogs have (and that require non-trivial server-side components to work) into a blog you can run anywhere. You can hug your data. It’s right there, on your server, but you also get these nice third party things.

It’s actually really slick, moving you between WordPress.com and your own blog fairly seamlessly, and making good use of OAuth flows to keep things secure while it does.

And if Automattic pull the plug tomorrow, or go on an incredible journey – well, you’ll lose some extra fancy parts of your install, but basically your WordPress site will be intact. Archive Team will not need to rescue your shit.