What caused the problem with movie theaters is not Netflix, but YouTube. What is making the old temples crumble is not smaller temples, but it’s rather this kind of polytheism — you know, you make your own gods.
Paola Antonelli, a curator of the MoMA and apparently their first web designer, quoted in Megan Garber’s article The Most Modern Curator.
Grist.org, the environmental journalism non-profit I’m on the board of, has received a Knight Foundation grant to “allow newsrooms to better measure audience engagement, beyond clicks and page views, by creating an open-source WordPress plugin that will measure ‘attention minutes’ to determine how long users are interacting with content.” I’m excited to see what they come up with, and that it will be open source, perhaps it’s something we can incorporate into Jetpack down the line. If hacking on that sort of thing and saving the planet is interesting to you, Grist is hiring WordPress developers.
Propublica has a piece on canvas fingerprinting done by the ad service that uses the trojan horse of sharing buttons, AddThis: Meet the Online Tracking Device That is Virtually Impossible to Block. Regardless of the usefulness of this particular technique, which seems to not be effective enough to stick around, services like AddThis and ShareThis will always spy on and tag your audience when you use their widgets, and you should avoid them if you care about that sort of thing. That’s why we put sharing buttons into Jetpack that are much more privacy (and performance) friendly.
The new site, designed to be cleaner, with new typefaces, will be based on the WordPress publishing system. It is expected to be easier to navigate for mobile users — among the fastest-growing segments of the readership.
The New Yorker is one of my top 3 favorite publications in the world, and I’m very excited they’ll be using WP for their next chapter.
One of the most surprising performances I saw at the North Sea Jazz festival was a French-Lebanese trumpet player named Ibrahim Maalouf. He plays a trumpet with a special additional fourth valve — three is standard — that allows him to more easily play Arabic maqams or scales with quarter tone and three quarter tone intervals along with equal temperament western ones, like Don Ellis. He also has a way of playing that sounds most like singing in his inflections and vibrato.
This is the best video I could find of one song he did called “Beirut,” and I’m amazed it only has 475 views. It’s worth 12 minutes out of your day, especially when it amps up at the end.
The audience on Saturday went totally bonkers, and the band did some even wilder songs to close including with jazz bagpipe (gaita?), which reminded me of Cristina Pato. Here’s a video of a similar end, but it’s a much more subdued crowd:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME2DfllFTh4
Amazing music, and also a good reminder of the power of a live performance, where a great artist can feed off the audience and vice versa. I wouldn’t mind going to a few more jazz shows where people are unafraid to hoot and holler and move a bit.
If you ever have a chance to see Ibrahim Maalouf live, I recommend it. It looks like he uses WordPress for his site, too, which makes him doubly cool.
Nick Hanauer advocates for $15 minimum wage in The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats. He was the first non-family investor in Amazon.com, and as he puts it, a “zillionaire.”
The factory model of work is dead, but its vestiges still haunt modern-day information workers from the giant companies all the way down to startups and bosses who blindly follow models of how things have been done before rather than reimagining how we work.
It should not matter what hours you work or where you’re [working] from. What matters is how you communicate and what you get done. It’s a waste of the natural resources of time and energy to commute; when we break the shackles of what looks like work versus what actually drives value, 90% of the cost and space of an office and management will disappear. We will manage by trust and measuring output, rather than the easier task of tallying input.
Longreads’ Best of WordPress, Vol. 1 is now up, and it’s a great reminder of the huge diversity and incredible quality of what people are publishing on WP across the web, on both .com and .org WordPresses. Great for picking up a few meatier reads for this holiday weekend.
NY Times did a neat article on their CMS Scoop, one cool piece of which is their ICE editor we worked on with them a few years ago. Their cropping stuff is also cool, though it’s dizzying how many sizes they need to produce. They included some numbers on the volume of content published through Scoop, “700 articles, 600 images, 14 slide shows and 50 videos per day,” and folks were asking about the latest from WordPress. Of course many people run WP on their own cloud or infrastructure, so these numbers aren’t comprehensive, but at least for WP.com and Jetpack blogs we now see every day 1,300,000 posts, 780,000 uploads (images and videos), and close to half of all posts have some sort of external content embedded in them, like a Youtube, Vimeo, or Tweet. I’m very proud that many members of the fourth estate from the Times to FiveThirtyEight are using WordPress.
iOS 8 WebKit changes finally allow all apps to have the same performance as Safari. I was just asked about the future of the mobile web at last night’s WP talk in Singapore. (Which had about 300 people there, great turnout!) There are still a lot of issues for the open web in a closed mobile world, but things like this are a great step in the right direction. Another reason I can’t wait for iOS 8. Hat tip: Matt Bumgardner.
“These big collections of personal data are like radioactive waste. […] Surveillance limits our ability to be creative with technology. It’s like a tax we all have to pay on innovation.”