Mike Hearn has a great and thought-provoking post on why he thinks Bitcoin is at a developer-caused impasse, and he’s ending his participation. I ended up selling most of my Bitcoin last year, but if I hadn’t this would definitely make me reconsider.
Category Archives: Asides
Interview in El Pais
If you speak Spanish, or know someone who does, check out this video and article that was on the El Pais homepage earlier today.
I joined an episode of the Dorm Room Tycoon podcast, which you can check out here.
Hossein Derakhshan was a key blogger in Iran who was jailed for his writing, and recently released. He has entered a new world:
I miss when people took time to be exposed to opinions other than their own, and bothered to read more than a paragraph or 140 characters. I miss the days when I could write something on my own blog, publish on my own domain, without taking an equal time to promote it on numerous social networks; when nobody cared about likes and reshares, and best time to post.
That’s the web I remember before jail. That’s the web we have to save.
You should read the entire article (it’s long) on the Guardian. Hat tip: Kevin O’Keefe.
Merry Christmas!
I hope it’s filled with lots of comfortable sweaters, like this one.
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Curious about what the famous Wapuu character came from, and the alternative designs for it? The Wapuu Fan Club has a great write-up of the origins of Wapuu, much of which I had actually forgotten already even though I was there.
Calypso for Linux
We just announced and released the Linux version of the desktop client for WordPress.com, also known as Calypso. Also all of the code behind the desktop client itself (built on Electron) is now available as open source too.
By allowing the government to construct a massive surveillance apparatus, the field had abused the public trust. […]
My sense is that politics is there, whether one acknowledges it or not. When you have an ostensibly apolitical department, but you scratch beneath the covers and discover that three-quarters of the faculty are funded by the Department of Defense, well, in fact that’s not apolitical. That is very much working in support of a particular ethos, and one simply hasn’t called it forth.
From The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists in the Atlantic.
If you’re curious what I sound like in German, here’s an interview with the German version of Wired about the future of the web and WordPress, complete with a Gutenberg reference.
State of the Word 2015
Here is the State of the Word presentation I delivered on Saturday, and the following Q&A.
If you just want to check out the slides, here they are on Slideshare:
LetsEncrypt is available as a beta so everyone can have free SSL, and PHP7 is released which will double the speed of many PHP apps, including WordPress. And it was the first day of WordCamp US, if you missed it definitely livestream tomorrow. (I’m doing the State of the Word at 5pm ET.) A pretty awesome day for the web.
George Lakoff is an academic whose books I came across in my college years, and he’s been very influential on me, especially his approach to language through metaphors. He has an updated version of a classic book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, which is a great read if you’re interested in progressive politics. I noticed a link to a PDF to a WordPress-sounding address, and it turns out his entire site is on WordPress.com!
Joule Sous Vide Machine
Last week I did two podcasts around the Calypso news that are both now up, and show very different sides of the announcement. The first was with Brian Krogsgard of the WordPress-focused site Post Status and we talked a lot about the Calypso launch in the context of the WordPress community. The second was the always-fun video group the Gillmor Gang which ranged quite a bit but mostly focused on Calypso in the context of the wider tech world and where we’re going.
Dan Gilbert on Happiness
This is an oldie but a goodie, Dan Gilbert’s TED talk on the Surprising Science of Happiness.
What’s the coolest uses and applications built on top of WordPress APIs that you’ve seen? I’m looking for some examples to highlight in the State of the Word next month.
If you listed the habits of successful people, tracking and measuring would be near the top of that list. I see it with people, companies, and teams that I work with. I see it in my own behavior.
Fred Wilson writes on Tracking and Measuring. Lack of measurement — picking stats and watching them before and after a launch — is one of the most common mistakes I see product teams make, certainly inside of Automattic.
Seventy-Five to Go
People are abuzz because it looks like the W3Techs survey of the web now has WordPress at 25% market share.
Sometimes it goes up and down through the course of a month, but it’s still a pretty fun milestone that we can now say about one in four websites are now powered by the scrappy open source underdog with its roots stretching all the way back to a single person in Corsica, France. We should be comfortably past 25% by the end of the year.
The big opportunity is still the 57% of websites that don’t use any identifiable CMS yet, and that’s where I think there is still a ton of growth for us (and I’m also rooting for all the other open source CMSes).
If you want to celebrate with us come to the first-ever WordCamp US event next month in Philadelphia (tickets still available) — it’s shaping up to be an amazing event. We just published the schedule and there are some amazing speakers and sessions.
I was wondering the other day how many miles of road were in every state, and guessed that Texas must be the highest. It turns out it is, according to this list of the road mileage of every state. It’s about 70% more than the runner-up, California. After TX and CA, it’s Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, and Missouri.
Tech blog idea: A site that covers the top headlines on Techmeme 6, 12, or 18 months after they happened, and explores the delta between what people said was going to happen when they raised funding, or did an acquisition, and what actually happens after time has run its course. We keep covering announcements like they matter. Can also compare analyst and commentator predictions for claim chowder.