I’m at the web spam summit and it’s going pretty well. I think some excellent things will come out of this. I wouldn’t want to be a spammer these days.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” –- Zen Master Shunryo Suzuki. Read more about Beginner’s Mind on zenhabits.
QiSci
Quantum scientists at University of Queensland are using WordPress to power their site, obviously sharp people. Another good use of WP as a CMS.
Lush Life
What better way to celebrate 50,000 downloads of WordPress 1.5 than with a delicious recording of John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman performing Lush Life. Lush Life was, of course, written by Billy Strayhorn.
.Blog
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.”
Web 2.0 Lies and Appearances
The Top 10 Lies of Web 2.0. I am in town, but I won’t be hanging around the Web 2.0 conference too much this week. However you can find me at Web 2.2 starting Thursday. (We’re a sponsor.) I’m giving a talk at Yahoo in Building B on Friday at 12 PM. (Bring food to throw.) Finally I’ll be at MySQL Camp this weekend. (Trying to figure out how to deal with thousands of queries a second across 50+ MySQL instances.) Update: Some folks thought this was a Web 2.0 diss, or an anti-Battelle/O’Reilly/etc statement. Not at all! I looped by the conference today and saw a lot of great folks, but it’s just not the best use of my time this year.
Future of Web Apps, Miami
Pictures from the Future of Web Apps Miami.
WP BBQ in Memphis
For the third year now I’m over in Memphis for the World Championship of BBQ, joined by Otto, Nacin, Scott, and Rose. Last year due to flooding the festival was moved to a fairgrounds inland, but there’s nothing quite like being right on the Mississippi with the sweet aroma of pork all around you. (An aroma that, incidentally, follows you home in your clothes. :)) The team we sponsor, the Moody Ques, put together an impressive booth this year, which you can see coming up in the below timelapse:
The video doesn’t do justice to the delicious food being cooked inside, though, which you have to experience in person.
Leap Motion
Leap Motion looks pretty amazing, and their site is powered by WordPress so you know they’re savvy.
Open Source Business Conference
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.
Snapfish Acquired
Days after Flickr, Snapfish is acquired by HP. Quick, start some more photo sites to sell.
CoPress
Seattle Trains
The Seattle airport is crazy, I had to get on three separate trains to get from my landing terminal to the departing one. I’m glad I wasn’t in a hurry.
Fitlog
Matt Haughey’s Fitlog is a
great use of custom fields for what has been called “datablogging” lately. We will be expanding our XML-RPC APIs with WordPress extensions to allow more remote programatic access to advanced WP features such as custom fields in the future.
WordCamp Kansai 2009
Exploring urban Osaka, including some rougher areas, and then WordCamp Kansai that night, which was basically a dinner with speakers.
Dojo Offline Toolkit
Amazon on WordPress
Joe Clark wrote in that the Amazon Development Center, India has a WordPress blog. I’ve never seen india.amazon.com and the whole thing feels very different from Amazon’s other sites. What’s the story?
Default Spam Handling
Dougal takes a look at built-in spam measures in WP and SpamLookup, I think we could integrate more in the next release.
CFP Observation
For a conference on privacy, there sure seems to be a lot of unencrypted traffic on this network.
Squeezebox2
There is a new Squeezebox out, and it looks awesome. I just wish they hadn’t raised the price so much! I really need 3 to do what I want to do, which is full multi-room audio, but at that price it may be economical just to have someone come out and wire the place up.