The Appel Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center has an awesome ambient sound system that sounds acoustic and full from every point in the 500-seat room.. Hat tip: Niall.
Category Archives: Asides
In truth, Medium’s main product is not a publishing platform, but the promotion of a publishing platform. This promotion brings readers and writers onto the site. This, in turn, generates the usage data that’s valuable to advertisers. Boiled down, Medium is simply marketing in the service of more marketing. It is not a “place for ideas.” It is a place for advertisers. It is, therefore, utterly superfluous.
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As a fan of minimalism, however, I think that term is misapplied here. Minimalism doesn’t foreclose either expressive breadth or conceptual depth.
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To get his fracking permit on your territory, Mr. Williams (the multibillionaire) needs to persuade you (the writer) that a key consideration in your work (namely, how & where you offer it to readers) is a “waste of time.”
Matthew Butterick’s essay The billionaire’s typewriter has a fairly complete and scathing takedown of Medium’s rhetoric, promise for writers, and product offering. Hat tip: Edward Aten.
“For every McDonald’s you blow up, ‘they’ will build two. Instead of slapping a wad of Semtex between the Happy Meals and the plastic tray, work your way up through the ranks, take over the board of Directors and turn the company into an international laughing stock.”
Sounds nice in theory. But I knew corporations were more resilient than that. Sabotaging the system from inside was as much a pipe dream as changing it through politics and protest.
From Prada Revolutionaries: Confessions of a Recovering Solutionist.
I’m very honored to be chosen as part of the
World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders class of 2015 alongside some really amazing folks. I spoke at Davos a few years ago and it was a very interesting experience — I think they snuck me in on a media badge, which is why I wrote a post about the fifth estate for them.
Scott Berkun asks Why Isn’t Remote Work More Popular?
Here’s a great article about WordPress meetup communities around the world, including Singapore, Argentina, France, Croatia, India, Serbia, Malta, Norway, South Africa, Canada, Switzerland, Ireland, Estonia, Egypt, Poland, Belgium, and Slovakia.
Jenna Wortham writes on Trying to Live in the Moment (and Not on the Phone). I’ve been using the Moment app recently too, here’s my past week of usage. (I think it might count phone calls as usage.)
Josh Kopelman on why raising a Series A is harder than ever, and how startups can adapt to survive the changing investment landscape. Fantastic essay, relevant for every company raising money at any stage.
Love is the light that sparked when only darkness existed
Taken in Houston today. Happy birthday Mom!
Since the Title II ruling from the FCC there’s been a lot of partisan rhetoric about the government taking over the internet, even in the comments of this very blog. I just came across Brad Feld’s post, Some Final Thoughts on the FCC and Title II Ahead of Tomorrow’s Vote on Net Neutrality and he does an awesome job breaking down and addressing each of the misconceptions.
We’re organizing an exciting new conference series focused on blogging, called Press Publish. The speaker list has some really awesome folks on it, and will include notable WordPress bloggers telling their stories as well as Automattic employees teaching tutorials and workshops. Plus, WordPress.com Happiness Engineers will be ready and waiting to help people one-on-one with their blogs.
The first two events are in Portland on March 28 and in Phoenix on April 18, and if you register with this link in the next week or so you get a discount, special for Ma.tt readers.
Personally I can say that it was the Jetpack features that helped provide the defaults that got me hooked on WordPress. If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t be where I am today.
Josh Pollock at Torque writes about Lessons we can learn from Jetpack.
This Man’s Simple System Could Transform American Medicine, about a quest to quantify the effects of medicine and treatment differently, which is really needed.
Update: Looks like it’s built on WordPress, too:
.@photomatt Thanks for the link! I built the site with Dave Newman (powered by WordPress)!
— Graham Walker, MD (@grahamwalker) March 9, 2015
WordPress [actually Automattic] has scored an important victory in court against a man who abused the DMCA to censor an article of a critical journalist. The court agreed that the takedown request was illegitimate and awarded WordPress roughly $25,000 in damages and attorneys fees.
Yes! Good laws become bad when people abuse them. Here’s the source: WordPress Wins $25,000 From DMCA Takedown Abuser (s/WordPress/Automattic/).
Joseph Mosby experiments with my trick of listening to a song on repeat to get work done, and digs a bit into the psychology behind it.
Om Malik on the decline of cameras as gadgets, Standalone camera: Shot (Dead) By iPhone.
Speaking of color masculinity, here’s Kanye on creativity, society, and color from his 2008 FADER interview:
I feel like all the words are in you, you’re just blocking yourself, you’re blocking your creativity. Society has put up so many boundaries, so many limitations on what’s right and wrong that it’s almost impossible to get a pure thought out. It’s like a little kid, a little boy, looking at colors, and no one told him what colors are good, before somebody tells you you shouldn’t like pink because that’s for girls, or you’d instantly become a gay two-year-old. Why would anyone pick blue over pink? Pink is obviously a better color. Everyone’s born confident, and everything’s taken away from you. So many people try to put their personality on someone else.
There’s the smart publishers, and then there’s the ones going out of business. WIRED is one of the smart ones, and just launched an awesome redesign on WordPress. From their editor-in-chief:
Back in 1994 we launched Hotwired, the first site with original editorial content created for the web. It was a digital home for reporting on the future of science, business, design, and technology. You’ve come to trust us over the past two decades, but our growth online has sometimes come too quickly and with some pain. When I took over as editor in chief in 2012, WIRED had an archive of more than 100,000 stories. That’s good! But they were spread out over more than a dozen different databases, sections, and homepages tenuously connected by virtual duct tape and chewing gum. The cleanup process—onerous and without a shred of glamour—took almost 15 months. But finally, last year, our engineers rolled out a newly unified site architecture built atop a single streamlined WordPress installation. And you didn’t notice a hiccup. Maybe you saw that pages loaded a touch faster. Stories looked more WIRED.
The story of the engineering behind it from Kathleen Vignos is also cool:
The redesign gives us the third incarnation of our Curator application, which started years ago as a separate Groovy on Grails application maintained by a single Java developer. Curator once consumed articles from 35 different blogs for curation on our homepage. When we migrated our 17 active WordPress blogs into one WordPress install, we also rewrote Curator in Cake PHP to match our WordPress PHP backend. After this, anyone on our team could maintain Curator—but the architecture remained the same and lived outside of WordPress. Using this version of Curator, our web producer team manually constructed the homepage throughout each day as various stories were ready to be promoted.
Our new and improved Curator is now a custom WordPress plugin—and it’s artificially intelligent! This allows our homepage and section landing pages to be both automated and curated at the same time. Stories flow through automagically based on editorial criteria, but editors can take control of the flow by locking stories in certain slots in our card system. This means our homepage and section landing pages are constantly changing with new stories all day long.
Curator sounds cool, as does the coming “longform feature article builder.”
It’s been a long road, but the WordPress mobile apps are finally making some major strides. WordPress iOS version 4.8 includes a visual editor so you won’t see code anymore when blogging on the go. (For anyone curious at home, WordPress originally shipped with WYSIWYG in version 2.0, and it was highly controversial at the time.)
A June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti.
Did you know pink and blue implying gender is relatively new, and all babies used to just wear white dresses?