Atavist & Automattic

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, and an interview about on the WP.com blog, Automattic has acquired the Atavist platform, magazine, and team. Looking forward to working alongside the team: we’re keeping the magazine going and it’ll complement Longreads, and integrating the best of the platform’s CMS and publisher features into WordPress.com and Jetpack and after that’s done providing an upgrade path so all of its publishers can move to being WordPress-powered.

simplenote-devicesAs Liz Gannes wrote in AllThingsD, Automattic has acquired Simplenote, the coolest notes service around which you can get on the iTunes app store or for a variety of other platforms, and Simperium, which if you’re a developer you should watch the video on their homepage and see how the technology can make what you’re doing even cooler. You can read our official announcements on the Simperium blog and the Simplenote blog, which also includes some future plans. I’ve been a daily user and fan of the service for a while now, and I’m looking forward to how we can use Simperium across WP.com.

Just Write with David Perell

Personal

I had an interesting conversation with David Perell on his North Star Podcast that I recommend checking out. He’s also leading a really interesting program called Write of Passage which is an online course which helps people grow their career by writing and sharing online, which I think is brilliant and a big source of my career growth over the years. I’ve heard he has another coming soon around information organization. David is someone to watch and follow.

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.

Comments and Collatz Conundrum

WordPress

Over the summer Terence Tao, a Fields Medal-winning mathematician considered one of the best of his generation, got an anonymous comment on his WordPress blog post from 2011 exploring the Collatz conjecture — one of the most persistent problems in math — suggesting he explore the problem for “almost all” numbers. Terence has been a regular WP.com blogger since 2007 and he and his commenters make extensive use of our LaTeX feature to express and embed equations.

That anonymous comment led him to an important breakthrough on the Collatz Conundrum, as Quanta Magazine reports. If you want great comments, you as the author have to participate in them and Terence is incredibly active in engaging with the commenters on his site.

I’ve always said that comments are the best part of blogging, but this is a particularly cool example. Here’s Terence’s latest post on it, with an excellent comment thread following.

“The reality is that more and more decisions, including decisions about life and death, are being made by software,” Thomas Dullien, a well-known security researcher and reverse engineer who goes by the Twitter handle Halvar Flake, said in an email. “But for the vast majority of software you interact with, you are not allowed to examine how it functions,” he said.

The Times has a great look at hacker and car manufacturer mishaps and makes the case over and over again for Open Source. It’s great to see more of the world waking up to the importance of open source.