.Blog

WordPress

It’s now public that Automattic is the company behind Knock Knock Whois There LLC, the registry for the new .blog TLD. (And a great pun.) We wanted to stay stealth while in the bidding process and afterward in order not to draw too much attention, but nonetheless the cost of the .blog auction got up there (people are estimating around $20M). I’m excited we won and think that it will be both an amazing business going forward and give lots of folks an opportunity to have a fantastic domain name in a new namespace and with an easy-to-say TLD. You can sign up to be first in line to reserve a domain here. If you have a trademark you can get in August, and then October for the “land rush.”

Spamback

Web Standards,

About 98% of Trackbacks are spam. Obviously that can’t be addressed with a new spec without breaking backward compatibility. (For added humor, see the front page of the Trackback Development Blog.) The charter of the new trackback abandons the only thing that made Trackback interesting, and incidentally one of the things it was created for, content aggregation and category aggregation and other applications that don’t require a link at all. (Essentially a push application of what everyone uses tags for now, it was way ahead of its time.) In the meantime, they’re re-inventing Pingback with XML-RPC replaced by Atom/REST.

Whoa, Newscorp

Press

Ross Levinsohn of Fox Interactive just announced he has bought someone here in the room. No one knows who it is, and it just got kinda tense. He’s announced the haven’t done an acquisition in 4-5 months, and he could buy at least 5 others in the room. 2 billion to burn. Under the Radar has been very interesting. “Myspace is got on average 275,000 signups a day last week.”

One area that’s been unloved for a bit on WordPress.org is the testimonials page, it was almost funny because they were so old they talked about things people don’t even know what they are any more. Well today is a new day, on the new page we’ll be embedding snippets from WordPress, Twitter, and Facebook of people saying what WordPress has meant for them. Post with the tag #ilovewp and it might show up there. 🙂 Think of something that you love about WP that would make someone who hasn’t heard of it or is on the fence about using it compelled to try it out.

Mario and NUX

In this video Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka discuss World 1-1, or the very first level in the very first Super Mario Bros. It’s fascinating how every element on the level is designed to introduce you to a mechanic of the game, or how Mario moves and jumps. This is interesting if you like Mario, but also important for any developer in any medium who is thinking about the NUX (new user experience) of their product. I sometimes joke that in WordPress we put people on the boss monster level the first time they enter the dashboard. There have been improvements but still so much to do to naturally introduce people to our interface.

Best Blogging Software?

Software, Tech

I used a neat tool to compare the features of b2/cafelog and Movable Type. As someone who currently uses b2, used to use Movable Type, and deals with MT on a daily basis, I don’t think I could say which was “better,” they’re just different. I think MT has a more robust archiving system with nicer URLs, but with b2 I can post to the blog with email, which has got to be one of the coolest features I’ve ever heard of. In terms of hackability, which I mean in the best way, I like how everything is updated live without having to rebuild anything, but of course that has a trade-off in speed. It really comes down to personal preference and experience. If Michel stopped developing b2 tomorrow, I would still use it because it just does everything I want it to do, plus I have a pretty good familiarity with the code, which helps a lot. Of course just knowing about something helps, for instance Kathy just switched to pMachine, which until she talked about it I hadn’t even heard of. I think what we need is a good google fight.

Since I wrote this I began developing my own software, WordPress, which runs this site and what I believe (having surveyed everything out there) to be the best blogging software available.

Good to keep in mind, especially as you’re making data-informed product decisions:

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

— Stephen Hawking

Open City Data

Events, WordPress

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.

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.

Open Source Business Conference

Events, Microsoft, Open Source

So there is an Open Source Business Conference happening in a few weeks a few blocks away from me and I just randomly came across the site. After SxSW, reading about OSBC is like being in another world: it’s $1500 to go, only two days long, the language on the site is sickeningly corporate, and I haven’t heard of a single person there. Then again, this is an “open source” conference with Microsoft as a platinum sponsor. A real Open Source conference would have no fees, everything would be web streamed, the line between speakers and attendees would be thin or non-existant, and the topics would not focus so much on money. Actually, it would be a bit like Bloggercon.