Washington Is Killing Silicon Valley, an editorial from the Wall Street Journal. The main thing the article misses is that while the economics of startups are currently distorted doing a startup is still one of the best ways to change the world, for your work to have an impact far beyond the walls of a single company. I’ve seen some killer startups recently, my only hope is that they have enough runway to make it to the execution of their idea. Entrepreneurship.gov says “Freedom is just another word for entrepreneurship.”
Category Archives: Asides
Friendster Switches
Friendster Relaunches Blogs, Switches to WordPress MU. Basically Friendster has switched millions of blogs from Typepad to WordPress, presumably at least partly because Six Apart abandoned their Typepad platform for third parties starting in late 2006 with Le Monde.
Art Direction Plugin
WordPress “Art Direction” Plugin, from Automattician Noel Jackson. Basically allows you to do what Jason Santa Maria does for his blog without all the custom code and template hacking, just a simple plugin.
WordPress Interface History
A Journey Through Five Years of WordPress Interface. Take a look at what the WordPress interface looked like at the beginning of 2008. How far we’ve come!
WordCamp SF 2009
WordCamp San Francisco 2009 will be on May 30, 2009.
Most Annoying Economic Crisis
Inside the world’s most annoying economic crisis, on a shortage of coins in Argentina. “Factoring in the 50 centavos he had already handed over, this effectively reduced the fare to 13.50 pesos, which, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment, is actually more than 14.50 pesos.” Hat tip: Paul Kedrosky.
Houston & Dubai
I’m going to be in Houston for Christmas and while there attending the December Refresh Houston Meetup. If you’re in Houston, come by and say hi. After that I’m going to Dubai for a little bit of vacation, but if there are any WordPress users there I’d love to meet up one night. I’ll be there the Dec 28–Jan 4.
Learn Faster
Gas Stations for Flying Cars
Open Thread: Social Web & Its Challenges . “building floating gas stations for the flying cars”
Open Source Economy
Three Reasons Open Source Will Save The Economy. Only three? I bet we could think of way more. 🙂
TwitterFE
Rewriting Twitter for web best practices. It has some rough edges, but pretty neat.
Wall Street’s Boom
“The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.” — The End of Wall Street’s Boom.
Apple HDCP
StartUP on Current
There’s a cool 10 minute piece covering TechStars on Current TV. They were filming the day I was there talking to the companies so I have a cameo appearance a few times.
Two Thunderbird Extensions
I find there are two extensions that I install for Thunderbird every time I set up a new computer. The first is Plaxo for Thunderbird, which does a pretty good job at syncing contacts. The second is Messagefaces with Gravatar support turned on, which you can find in Add-ons > Options > Online Services. (Wish it was on by default, it doesn’t really work without it.) Plaxo has an avatar feature but I turn it off because way more people have Gravatars than Plaxo avatars.
NYTimes Sleep
3 Million
This fellow caught the WP download counter passing 3 million last night. Cool! That’s total downloads of the 2.6 series, we reset it every time we do a major X.X release.
IntenseDebate Reopens
IntenseDebate is back open to the public, and has a new WordPress plugin that does a two-way comment sync so all of your comments are always stored in your database so you can easily turn ID on and off without losing anything.
Hulu Kudos
I wanted to take a moment out to give kudos to the folks behind Hulu. Remember how much criticism and naysaying they got before and during their launch? It must feel good to have executed so well, and the content they have is really killer. You can watch all of Fifth Element, for example.
WordCamp Australia
I’ll be in Australia later this month for WordCamp Australia – if you’re in the country you should come out.