Category Archives: Asides

Interesting links.

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.

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.

Extended Interview with Forbes

J. J. Colao, who covered Automattic for Forbes Magazine in 2012 and has a long history and experience with WordPress and Automattic, sat down with me for close to three hours in March and somehow managed to distill it down to just a few thousand words of interview. (“13,500 words down to 2,800.”) I’m sheepish to link it because there are a lot of “I” statements and some nuance lost in the distillation, but JJ asks great questions and we cover a lot of ground that anyone who follows Automattic or the WordPress ecosystem I think will find interesting. You can check it out here.

Seoul, Jakarta, Singapore, Tokyo, Osaka, Manila, Melbourne, Sydney, Wellington, and Auckland

Later this week I’m heading on a speaking tour of a number of cities in Asia, Australia, and New Zealand talking about the past and future of WordPress and some of the things I’ve learned in the past few years of building WordPress and Automattic. It’s been a number of years since I’ve visited these countries, and I’ve never been to Korea, Singapore, Melbourne, or Auckland before, so really looking forward to meeting the local communities in each of these cities and learning about how we can best set up WordPress for the coming decade of growth, especially in languages other than English.

If you’re near any of these cities and want to come by check out the following links for more information. Even if it says “sold out” already, as many are, put your name on the waitlist anyway because I know some places are already searching for larger venues, and there could always be cancellations or spaces open up at the last minute.

Asia

Australia & New Zealand

The schedule might be a little exhausting, but I wanted to make it as many communities as possible in the short window of time I have before I need to be stateside again.

Scrollkit and Longreads at Automattic

You might have seen the news last week that Longreads is joining Automattic’s editorial team. Today I’m excited to announce that we’ve acquired Scroll Kit and they’re joining Automattic as well, and will be focused on making customization more visual and intuitive. We’re barely on the second inning of what WordPress could be, and the impact it can have on the world, and I consider myself very lucky to be working with the best and brightest on transforming the way the world publishes.

In April and May, there are Automattic team meetups and events happening in Budapest, Napa Valley, Pender Island, New Orleans, Barbados, Cardiff, Konstanz, Playa Del Carmen, Portland, Toronto, Saratoga Springs, Palermo, Edinburgh, and Lisbon. Did I mention that we’re hiring?