Adobe to aquire Macromedia for $3.4 billion. Whoa! At first I thought this was a late April fool’s joke.

Someone cloned all of Ta-da List into Bla-Blah List which uses Flash for the interface instead of HTML/JS. What’s even more interesting is it’s all Open Source, so now I could run my own copy of Ta-da on one of my machines. Too bad the backend is in Java and not something I could easily run, like PHP, Python, Ruby, or Perl.

Okay so it looks like the best place in terms of size, price, and location of those suggested is The Pike Pub & Brewery which sounds like a fun, laid-back place perfect for a meetup. Thanks to Scott and Jane for suggesting it. Still going to meet at 1 PM. It looks like there are going to be some great people attending, so it should be a lot of fun. Oh, and the tag for today is “wordpressmeetup“. 🙂

For a conference on privacy, there sure seems to be a lot of unencrypted traffic on this network.

Okay, so the Seattle meetup is going to be on Saturday at 1 PM in downtown Seattle. Exact location to be determined. Scoble is going to suggest some places and come out and Scott Berkun is also trying to make it out. Should be some interesting conversation. If you leave a comment with an email I’ll email you when we know the place. Update: Here’s the skinny.

Get a Firefox download counter for your blog, I wrote a quickie plugin for WordPress that’ll grab and cache the number.

Announcing the new WordPress hosting page. Update: I forgot to thank Chris Messina for helping out with the design of the page.

I went to the BayCHI event last night which had speakers from Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, A9, and Jakob Nielson. I mentioned WordPress and thanked him for his free articles, which I usually enjoy even if I don’t agree with them. Niall snapped a picture of Jakob and I on his Sony F828.

WordPress 1.5.0 broke 150,000 downloads earlier today.

I suppose now is a good time to blog that I’m going to be speaking at the 15th annual conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy in Seattle this Friday on the panel “Unstoppable Speech (or, The Revolution Will Be Podcast).” If you’re in the area you should check out the conference, it looks excellent. I’m also looking for things to do in Seattle, any suggestions? Anyone interested in a WordPress meetup?

Dougal takes a look at built-in spam measures in WP and SpamLookup, I think we could integrate more in the next release.

This Blogger autosave feature is something I’ve been wanting to do for WordPress for a while, but I had envisioned it as an asynchronous javascript updating the draft every minute or so if the post was over 50 words long. Perhaps this cookie approach is better. Anyone want to try it for WP?

Peter Westwood wrote in that the UK Liberal Democrats election blog is on WordPress and looks pretty professional. I have no idea about UK politics, but it’s nice to see WordPress being used in more and more high-profile sites.

Mark Jaquith wrote in to say “The University of South Florida in Tampa is using WordPress to run student blogs. http://blog.usf.edu/ The blogs are available to each of the school’s 42,000 students! The blogs have some pretty slick features like an included Gallery photo album, a unified login system, del.icio.us integration, Flickr integration, and pre-installed CSS varieties. They even provide unified RSS/Atom feeds for all of the blogs.” I don’t know what to add to that, except that this is fantastic. I wonder how long before other universities start to follow in their footsteps?

WordPress Lessons on the Codex are looking good, in fact the entire Codex is becoming a fantastic documentation resource. Kudos to Lorelle for kicking these off.

XFN Graph is a tool that you give a URL and it then spiders all the XFN relationships and shows them in a neat graph/map.

Om on why I can’t pay att… ooh look, shiny!

Joe Clark wrote in that the Amazon Development Center, India has a WordPress blog. I’ve never seen india.amazon.com and the whole thing feels very different from Amazon’s other sites. What’s the story?