Rachael Chong has an article on Fast Company Co.exist that includes my thoughts on giving, charity, and impact in the world.
Category Archives: Asides
I’m really excited about the launch of WordPress.com Connect. Yes Facebook et al offer similar APIs and have more users, but there are two key differences. First is Automattic is not an advertising-driven company, so our priorities around users are different than ones who are. Second is that these APIs are the basis for interacting with any element of an entire website hosted on WP.com or not, meaning themes, widgets, posts, content, CSS… any company that does something that ultimately ends up on a website should be looking at the APIs on developer.wordpress.com and pushing us where there isn’t one yet.
Bruce Schneier on The Public-Private Surveillance Partnership. Packed with good links as well.
The 2013 Emmy nominations have been announced and included among the nominees is the Lift-built AMC The Walking Dead StorySync, which is nominated in the Outstanding Interactive Program category.
Steve Denning writes convincingly on the crumbling myth of shareholder value as the primary driver of companies.
Naval describes the venture model while suggesting a way for firms to differentiate.
We help our customers but don’t tell them exactly how. Our core product is a commodity, yet we don’t disclose pricing. Even when we do, there are substantial hidden costs. It has to be bought in bulk, more than they want. We can take months to onboard a customer. We reject most of them but don’t actually give them a straight answer. They don’t get dedicated support. They don’t get to choose or replace their representative. We don’t commit to serve them in the future. We have hundreds of competitors with the same strategy. Now where’s my check?
I’ll be speaking three times this weekend: First Saturday at noon at Techweek Chicago, where I’ll be chatting with Bing’s Stefan Weitz. A few hours later at 4pm I’ll be at WordCamp Chicago doing a town hall. Then Sunday at 4pm I’ll be up with our Quebec friends at WordCamp Montreal doing another town hall. Then, I will sleep.
David Cowan writes as A Contrarian Futurist, with thoughts on wearable computing and cyber warfare.
WP Daily has a post that is interesting both for the dozens of pictures of WordPress cakes and confections from yesterday as well as a good roundup of posts about the 10th anniversary.
Michelle Atagana from Memeburn posted an interview we did when I was in South Africa: Matt Mullenweg on how open source is democratising the web.
The Wall Street Journal interviews Annise Parker on Houston and calls it “The Modern American Boomtown”. I think Houston is the most under-appreciated city in North America, as anyone who’s hung out with me for more than a few hours has heard me preach.
Wired has a great cover story on Audrey portfolio company SmartThings: In the Programmable World, All Our Objects Will Act as One.
Four Little Numbers, Joen Asmussen talks about working on this year’s new default theme for WordPress, which also just launched on WordPress.com.
Dave Winer tweeted this on Saturday:
I have a little spare time today so I decided to start on River3. It'll be much much smaller and more focused than River2.
— Dave Winer (@davewiner) April 13, 2013
One of the things I love and admire about him is that many, many years after he doesn’t have to anymore he’s still learning, hacking, and taking free time on a weeknd to make something new.
Almost 3 years ago we released a version of WordPress (3.0) that allowed you to pick a custom username on installation, which largely ended people using “admin” as their default username. Right now there’s a botnet going around all of the WordPresses it can find trying to login with the “admin” username and a bunch of common passwords, and it has turned into a news story (especially from companies that sell “solutions” to the problem).
Here’s what I would recommend: If you still use “admin” as a username on your blog, change it, use a strong password, if you’re on WP.com turn on two-factor authentication, and of course make sure you’re up-to-date on the latest version of WordPress. Do this and you’ll be ahead of 99% of sites out there and probably never have a problem. Most other advice isn’t great — supposedly this botnet has over 90,000 IP addresses, so an IP limiting or login throttling plugin isn’t going to be great (they could try from a different IP a second for 24 hours).
On (Un)organized Consumption by Automattician Cheri Lucas. “I stopped using Instapaper. Early on, I relied on it as a space to store ideas and information I could draw from, but it quickly became my intellectual limbo: the unfortunate vault of forgotten stories and Twitter residue.”
TechCrunch writes WordPress.com Has Imported 15M Posts In The Last 30 Days, Remains A Top Safe Haven For Nomad Bloggers. I’m very proud of the 8+ years we’ve been a home for, and protected, our users blogs. Protection covers many aspects: backups, scalability, security, speed, permalinks, mobile versions, forward-compatible markup, clean exports… the list goes on. We’ve done the same with other internet-scale services, like Akismet, Gravatar, and Jetpack, and I hope to earn the same trust in the coming decade with VaultPress and Simperium.
No to NoUI by Timo Arnall is one of the better pieces I’ve read on design and interfaces, and is also chock-full of links that will keep you busy for hours.
The Redhat of Drupal
I got this email today:
Hi Matt,
I apologize for the cold email. I was researching Automattic , Inc. and wanted to ask you if there was any gaps/pains within your CMS and website. I work for the “Redhat of Drupal”, (Acquia) and we have seen an explosion of Drupal use in the Media, News, and Entertainment Industry.
Some companies using Drupal/Acquia include Warner Music, Maxim, NBC Universal, and NPR.
If you are evaluating your current system or are looking into new web projects, I would love to connect and discuss Drupal as an option.Would it make sense to connect on this? If there is someone better at Automattic , Inc. to speak with, perhaps you could point me in the right direction?
Cheers,
—
Dillon J. ********
Enterprise Drupal Solutions
Direct: (781) 238-****http://www.acquia.com
Acquia, 25 Corporate Drive Fourth Floor
Burlington, MA 01803Acquia ranked #1 Software Vendor on the 2012 Inc 500
Hmmm, maybe I’ve been doing it wrong all these years… Dillon, I’ll be in touch!