What a Week: WordPress, Maeda, .Blog

Automattic

I’m still overwhelmed from last week, which was full of major announcements. Get your Instapaper / Pocket ready because I have lots of links!

It started with a very smooth WordPress release, version 4.6 “Pepper.” A week later it’s had over 4,200,000 downloads and upgrades are rippling throughout the WP ecosystem with 13% of all known installs already on the latest. WordPress 4.6 was available on release day in 50 languages, which blows my mind.
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The next big move was John Maeda joining Automattic as our Global Head, Computational Design and Inclusion. You can check out some of his talks on TED and his Twitter is always interesting. This was covered fairly well by mainstream media, especially with feature articles by Wired on the open source aspect, Fast Company on the inclusion side, and Techcrunch on the business side.

As often, the best stories are often personal ones: Om is a friend of both John and I, long-time Automattic designer Matt Miklic shared his “I will never stop learning” journey and and how he helped hire for this role, and finally John told his own story directly on Design.blog.

In the beginning days of the Web, Open Source was a human right.

You might notice something about that domain… it’s a .blog! We opened up .blog for early registrations and launched the first few founder domains like get.blog, design.blog, dave.blog, and of course matt.blog. More coming this week!

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Design.blog also launched with great essays from Alice Rawsthorn, Cassidy Blackwell, and Jessica Helfand. It will be updated every Thursday with a new home page design and new round of great voices, so bookmark it and be sure to visit again in a few days.

Huge thanks to Judy Wert who led the search for the design role. Combined with Chris Taylor starting as Chief Marketing Officer at Automattic a few months ago I think we’re well-positioned to really boost the growth of WordPress in the coming years. You may have even started to see video ads for WP.com. We’ve had 90 people start so far this year at Automattic bringing our total to just under 500 in 50 countries, if you’d like to join the family we’re hiring for over a dozen roles.

As you can tell, things have been moving at a hundred miles per hour, and the momentum is carrying through the all-company Grand Meetup in Whistler next month and WordCamp US in December. I’m going to take a few days to unplug at Burning Man next week (photos from my first year), might even take a Real Camera to capture some of the art.

If U.S. roads were a war zone, they would be the most dangerous battlefield the American military has ever encountered. Seriously: Annual U.S. highway fatalities outnumber the yearly war dead during each Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, the War of 1812, and the American Revolution. When all of the injuries from car wrecks are also taken into account, one year of American driving is more dangerous than all those wars put together.

From The Absurd Primacy of the Automobile in American Life in The Atlantic.

Web 2.0 Lies and Appearances

Asides, Events

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.

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.

Open Source Business Conference

Asides

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.