NomadList has list of cities around the world sortable by cost of living, temperature, and internet speed, so if you can work from anywhere you can choose someplace fun to do so. Hat tip: Matt Galligan.
Category Archives: Asides
As the engineer and writer Alex Payne put it, these startups represent “the field offices of a large distributed workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their associate institutions,” doing low-overhead, low-risk R&D for five corporate giants. In such a system, the real disillusionment isn’t the discovery that you’re unlikely to become a billionaire; it’s the realization that your feeling of autonomy is a fantasy, and that the vast majority of you have been set up to fail by design.
From Wired’s One Startup’s Struggle to Survive the Silicon Valley Gold Rush.
wpgo.go is a command-line tool to interact with WordPress blogs, written in Google’s Go language. It’s cool to see this new generation of apps built on WP.com + Jetpack’s new APIs, like Postbot.
Sometimes you have an idea, and the universe delivers. Hotel WiFi Speed Test let’s you speed test and search hotels by their internet speed, something I was wishing existed just last week. Since I work primarily on the road, I would pick fast internet over pretty much any other amenity a hotel could possibly offer. Speedspot also offers similar info. It’s funny how sometimes the less expensive hotels often have much better internet — I think this is because they try to do less with captive proxies and such.
I’ve been enjoying a new-to-me app called Blinkist, which is basically summaries of interesting non-fiction books. The summaries are really well-written, and I enjoy reading them as refreshers even when I’ve read an entire book already. Many business or non-fiction books I read would have been better as an article, and you can tell when a publisher has encouraged an author to pad the book a bit so they can sell it for more, and the Blinkist version often satisfies my curiosity there. And finally there’s some I read that just whet my appetite for more, and I end up ordering the full book. I ended up subscribing to the service for $50/yr.
Do you know what the Fermi Paradox is? Take 20 minutes to read this article and I promise you’ll never look at the stars the same way again.
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 York Times writes about how The New Yorker is overhauling its design and online presence, including experimenting with paywalls and this wonderful nugget:
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.
Ibrahim Maalouf Wowed Me
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 only word for the crowd was “pandemonium” — I’ve never seen a jazz audience react to music like that; it reminded me of the famous Duke Ellington / Paul Gonsalves performance and the riot that followed.
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. 🙂
Kottke: The surprising ages of the Founding Fathers on July 4, 1776. While we’re talking about the Founding Fathers, Marc Andreessen thinks that the Founding Fathers Arguably Designed US System Specifically To Be Dominated By Moneyed Interests
Sara Rosso writes 10 Lessons from 4 Years Working Remotely at Automattic. (Lesson 11, left out: Always give list articles an odd number of items.)
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 Wall Street Journal has a nice feature on their 125th anniversary that includes thoughts from people from Alice Waters to Tyra Banks and everyone in between, including yours truly on the Future of Managers. Here’s my quote:
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.
Chris Lema writes on how WordPress gives you tools to change lives.
You can now count on a “Snowden Sunday” every few weeks: some jaw-dropping revelation that if you had suggested it a few years ago people would have dismissed you as a tin-foil-hat-wearing paranoid. Now the hardest part is not becoming numb. Here’s the latest from The Washington Post: In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are. Bonus: CIA employee’s quest to release information ‘destroyed my entire career.’
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.
Scoop and Scale
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.