Category Archives: Asides

Interesting links.

Kids are All Right

Asides

My friend Liz Welch recently finished up her new book with her siblings, The Kids are All Right. “Well, 1983 certainly wasn’t boring for the Welch family. Somehow, between their handsome father’s mysterious death, their glamorous soap opera star mother’s cancer diagnosis, and a phalanx of lawyers intent on bankruptcy proceedings, the four Welch siblings managed to handle each new heartbreaking misfortune together. But all that changed with the death of their mother. While nineteen year-old Amanda was legally on her own, the three younger siblings—Liz, 16; Dan, 14 and Diana, 8—were each dispersed to a different set of family friends.” I just ordered it on my Kindle.

Automattic Aquires AtD

Asides,

Automattic just purchased a company and service called After the Deadline, an amazingly smart contextual spelling and grammar checker, and can catch errors even the New York Times misses. It’s now live for 7.5 million WordPress.com blogs and available as a free plugin for .org users, it replaces the built-in spell checker on TinyMCE. It’s a cool story, they were actually rejected from Y Combinator and a few other seed funds but kept at it anyway, and has now found a home in the Automattic family. I found out about the service from Hacker News.

Open City Data

Asides

Yesterday I was part of a press conference by Mayor Gavin Newsom promoting DataSF.org, which is one of San Francisco’s first steps at opening up. Tim O’Reilly also spoke and made the point to me afterward that as he dives deep into every part of the intersection of technology and government he’s most excited about the prospect for change at the city level. Here are some pictures from the event. I think we’ll see more along these lines, and more WordPress, for San Francisco in the future.