The Art of Right Now by Hiten Shah.
Category Archives: Asides
“Apple Lossless, also known as ALAC, is a lossless audio codec Apple developed some time ago for digital music. The codec compresses music files anywhere from 40-60 percent of their original size with no discernible loss in audio quality or fidelity.” — Apples ALAC codec is now open source. About a year and a half ago I started re-ripping all my music in ALAC, it’s fantastic, especially now that iTunes can down-convert when syncing to iPhones / iPods.
ReadWriteWeb covers the WordPress.com / Federated Media deal which will give high-end bloggers access to run advertising from FM, which is significantly higher quality than alternatives like Google Adsense, which has been declining in quality and is no longer a great choice for bloggers. Proud to be part of the empowerment of the Independent Web, which is the dark matter of the internet.
Liz Gannes breaks the story that Automattic has made its first investment, in newspaper toolmaker OwnLocal.
The other week in my hometown of Houston, Texas I ended up on stage in a joint conversation with Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal. The video of our chat is now on WordPress.tv, and worth checking out particularly if you’re curious about the early history of both projects. We’re more alike than different, and Dries is someone I respect a lot.
A great piece in the New York Times today: How do you parent without a future, knowing that you will lose your child, bit by bit?
This essay by Steve Yegge on Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook is pretty killer, I suggest giving it a read.
“We’ve seen WordPress do some amazing things, and almost every one of us has used Google Maps to explore the world around us. […] This website is a beautiful mashup of WordPress, Google Maps and photography.” — Brad McCarty at The Next Web.
Typekit has announced that they’ve been acquired by Adobe, I’m excited for Bryan, Jeff, and the whole team and can’t wait to see what they launch next. Had the pleasure of working with Typekit as an investor and as a partner in WordPress.com’s Custom Design feature.
The official URL for Amazon’s new browser, Silk, is amazon.com/silk which right now redirects to amazonsilk.wordpress.com. This is not a VIP deal or anything, it’s just a free blog on WP.com which Beau noticed from their press release. I’m guessing they just wanted a quick and easy way to make a functional and beautiful website, which is kind of the whole idea of WordPress. 🙂
I was fortunate enough to be put on Vanity Fair’s Next Establishment list with a variety of cool people.
Now, more and more of the computing power we use comes from a CPU across the Internet. We no longer own our digital homes. Instead, we live rent-free with our parents.
The Clouds My-Mom-Cleaned-My-Room Problem by Alexis Madrigal.
At least 40% of TIME.com traffic is going through WordPress, probably more when you add up the non-vertical sites. Bummer they never mention WordPress in the original article.
It’s not only about the money, says Matt Mullenweg, a techie who helped create the popular WordPress blogging software and has invested in Getaround. Some of this is about “my generation’s desire to conserve resources and make better use of what we have to leave the world a better place for our children.”
Silicon Valleys Rental Boom on The Daily Beast by Dan Lyons.
Amazon is hiring designers and using WordPress to do so. Update: Site is down, anyone know what happened? I wonder if it wasn’t meant to be public. Update 2: Now it’s back.
Theme Code Matters, Too on Themeshaper.
Seth Godin: The warning signs of defending the status quo. Hat tip: Andrew Spittle.
I’m somewhere in the middle of the Arctic Sea right now, approximately 78°05’N, 28°45’E, but even through the thin pipe of an intermittent satellite connection the ripples were felt of the announcement that Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple. Jobs, or the idea of him, has had a profound impact on innumerable founders and CEOs. My own tribute to him (and Apple as an organization) is in the essay 1.0 is the Loneliest Number, where reviews of the original iPod punctuate a story of the messy act of creation. Moments like this give us an opportunity to take a step back and contemplate the bigger picture, so take a moment to read the post and think about what you’re launching next.
6 of the 10 Republican presidential candidates are using WordPress, the other 4 are on Drupal, which means all 10 are on an Open Source CMS.