GigaOM Pro is a new subscription research site from my friends on the GigaOM crew. It’s also the first major media site I know about powered by BuddyPress and it’ll be interesting to see how the social features influence the sites evolution. Here’s Mark Jaquith’s post about building it.
Category Archives: Asides
Ask Matt!
Ask me a question here and I’ll pick the best and post a video answer here on this blog. This was always the intention of the Ask Matt category, just never got around to doing it before. 
Journaling Tools
WordPress listed as one of “Five Best Journaling Tools” at Lifehacker.
WordCamp Developer Day
I have some cool news: On Sunday the day after WordCamp San Francisco we’re going to host a WordPress developer day at the Automattic office on Pier 38. It will be Barcamp-style with no pre-announced schedule, but expect more hardcore geek content like heavy WordPress performance optimization, BuddyPress internals, an intro to Erlang, a guide to secure coding, WordPress-as-CMS discussions, and more. If there’s a topic you’d like to lead start thinking about it now, there should be plenty of room for everyone to connect. (Try to keep things local though, we’re not sure how the internet will hold up.)
How David Beats Goliath
Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath, from Malcolm Gladwell. A really enjoyable read. Hat tip: Raanan.
BuddyPress for the World
Happy to announce that BuddyPress is now available to the world. BuddyPress is a package built on top of WordPress which transforms WP into a social network complete with profiles, friends, messaging, groups, and even activity streams. Of course it’s 100% GPL and Open Source. It’s built on top of MU (which can be tricky to install) so still not for everybody yet, but this is a major milestone in the WordPress world. Check it out. Congrats to Andy and the whole BuddyPress team. Here’s Andy’s official announcement post and WordPress.org.
Spam SEO
Wired Joins the Family
I wanted to take a moment to welcome Wired.com’s 12 blogs to the WordPress family! (They just completed their switch from Typepad.) I thought this completes my prediction from January that WP would reach over 40% of this list of top blogs, but when I went to the Technorati 100 today everything has changed! First, they only show ten blogs at a time now (lame!) and second there appears to have been huge churn on the list,so we’ll have to wait until next January to do an apples-to-apples comparison.
WP.com
WordPress CodeSniffer
WordPress CodeSniffer Standard. Helps you format your code in wp-style.
PollDaddy PHP
PollDaddy just finished their big switch from ASP.NET/SQL to PHP/MySQL. Go and give the guys a virtual Guinness.
Blogs Are Dead
Blogs are dead; long live the blog by Andrew Keen after our dinner in Amsterdam last week.
WordPress Authors Wanted
Wiley is looking for savvy WordPress folks to author new books they want to publish. If you love writing and are a WordPress wizard than contact Carol Long.
Google Analytics script
40% still use old Google Analytics script. Don’t forget to update to the newest Google Analytics script call. (And drop in WordPress.com Stats while you’re in there to get something quick and author-centric.)
New WordCamp SF Site
The new site for WordCamp San Francisco is online, go check it out. Got some more speakers and announcements when I get back from Japan.
Scotch Whisky Guide
YCombinator and Techstars
YCombinator and Techstars spawning similar startups. I’ve noticed this too, though it’s most likely just good ideas occuring to several folks at once and the seed folks lowering the barrier to entry of starting a company and execution, so we notice more of the confluences.
Bryght Closing
The End of a Bryght Era. One of the earliest hosted CMS ventures (based on Drupal) is closing.
WordCamp China, Hong Kong, and Japan
I’ll be attending our two WordCamps in China: WordCamp China in Shanghai, on April 4, and WordCamp Hong Kong on April 5. I think this says I’m going to be in Japan for WordCamp on April 12th.
Downloadable Web Fonts
Downloadable font formats for the Web. See also: Web Font Optimizer (visit in anything except Firefox). 2009 will be an exciting year for typography on the web, particularly when Firefox 3.5 comes out this summer. Hat tip: Mark Wubben.