Thunderbird Tags

Asides

It is pretty annoying tha the “tag” system in Thunderbird bears no relation to any tagging system implemented within the past four years. It is, at best, a non-folder-based categorization system, and doesn’t even have a particularly good UI for that. Thunderbird 2 also took away the views dropdown, which was an eminently useful feature, and the only way I can find to replicate it is to create search folders, which are of course are a lot clunkier. Might be time for a downgrade. Update: You can add back the views dropdown from the customize menu. Sweet! PhotoMatt.net readers rock. 🙂

Meaningful Overnight Relationship

press

One thing I’ve noticed about talking to certain types of press, particularly mainstream, is that they have a pattern in mind before they write about something, and the better you conform to the pattern the more coverage you get.

I think what they really want is an unusually young founder, possibly with a partner, who stumbled on an idea in an epiphany moment, implemented it in days, and then enjoyed overnight success, preferably capped with some sort of financial hook such as a huge VC funding or selling out to a large company for millions of dollars.

It’s not uncommon to get leading questions trying to hit a point in the above patterns… Yes, WordPress really is four years old. I was 19. No, I didn’t create it alone, if I did you would have never heard of it. Actually, it entered a rather crowded field, not even close to being first. No, not planning to sell it, there isn’t really anything to sell, it’s more of a movement. No, I didn’t make 60 million dollars in 18 months.

What’s worst is I think these stories sell a false promise and hope to people outside of the industry — it attracts the wrong type of entrepreneurs — and inside of the industry it distracts us from what really matters.

Someday I think there will be a realization that the real story is more exciting than the cookie-cutter founder myth the media tries frame everything in. It’s not just one or two guys hacking on something alone, it’s dozens of people from across the world coming together because of a shared passion. It’s not about selling out to a single company, it’s dozens of companies independently adopting and backing an open source platform for no reason other than its quality. I’m not a millionaire, and may never be, but there are now hundreds of people making their living using WordPress, and I expect that number to grow to tens of thousands. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning, not the prospect of becoming a feature on an internet behemoth’s checklist.

Finally it’s not Web 2.0, or another bandwagon me-too content management system with AJAX, it’s a mature project that has been around and grown up over four years of hard work, and it has many, many more years of hard work ahead of it. I smile these days when I see WordPress referred to as an “overnight success,” if only they knew how long an overnight success takes.

Update, see also:

Postiecon

Asides

“So, PostieCon (a conference sponsored by PayPerPost) was among the most controversial things I’ve ever done. People really hated that I was speaking there. I got constant crap from my friends and foes alike because of my decision to speak there. But, it turned out they didn’t have enough attendees so they postponed it to November.” — Robert Scoble

Technorati and Authority

Technorati

Did anyone notice how Technorati is now showing an Authority score for blogs? I searched for it on Technorati, which took me to this blog talking about the feature, which seems to indicate it’s an alias for number of unique blogs linking in the past 180 days. It would be neat if the number had a little more secret sauce.

So using the new number, WordPress.org has 634,821 unique active blogs linking to it, and WordPress.com has 496,462. Given that I know we have 931,951 live blogs on WordPress.com, Technorati seems to indicate that about 53% of them are active, which seems within the realm of possibility. However I don’t think the same methodology works for all sites, for example Livejournal which claims 12,877,330 live blogs only shows up with 481,843 in the last 6 months in Technorati, seems unusually far below their million blogs updated in the past 1 month, even taking into account a huge number may be private.