Jonas has a Technorati Cosmos plugin which is kinda neat. I think it may have the wrong approach though, here’s how a really nice Technorati plugin would work: watch the site cosmos feed for incoming links, if the link isn’t to the root use the same code we use for Pingbacks to determine what post it’s linking to, if one at all, then check if the incoming link already exists as a Trackback or Pingback, and if not insert it into the comment table chronologically in line with the rest of the comments. (And send a notification email.) Cosmos should work transparant of other forms of commenting. Bonus points if it works with referrer data too, call it “remote-comments.”
Kindle Podcast
Matt Mullenweg Loves His Kindle, from a chat I had with Mashable. Posting from Greece, where it’s hot.
Image Headline Plugin
coldforged Image Headline Plugin gives you really nice shadows, I’ll have to check out how he did that.
Exploring Ios
Exploring a small village on Ios, ferry and dinner on Santorini.
Surprise Me
Randy Kennedy at the New York Times covered the Seven on Seven event and my collaboration with Evan Roth which resulted in Surprise Me on WordPress.com. There was also coverage in BusinessWeek. Hat tips to Niall and Noel for some day-of bug fixes and debugging.
At Spam Summit
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.
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.
University of Houston profile
University of Houston, which I attended for 2 years, created a profile of me for their “You Are the Pride” campaign. In the list I am currently alphabetically sandwiched between Carl Lewis and Hakeem Olajuwon.
Jay Rosen (and Barry Eisler) on the surveillance state’s efforts to make journalism harder, slower, less secure. The gist: why would they destroy hard drives they know there are copies of, and detain couriers they know they’ll have to release?
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.
The Atlantic does an in-depth look on why it’s much less pleasant to have phone calls than it used to be. It’s true, but there are also some great alternatives that I’ve been having luck with recently. Facebook Messenger has a built-in audio (and video!) calling system that is okay. Facetime isn’t just for video, you can also make audio calls with it and they sound amazing (something I learned from Kanye, true story). Many times I’ll try a phone number in Facetime first just in case the person uses an iPhone. And finally Skype still works pretty well even if its clients are a bit heavy. If I’m able to be at a computer (all of these work on computer as well as apps), this Sennheiser USB headset sounds great, blocks background noise, and people say that I sound clear.
Snapfish Acquired
Days after Flickr, Snapfish is acquired by HP. Quick, start some more photo sites to sell.
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.
Summer of Code
WordPress is part of Google Summer of Code this year, with some real rock-stars mentoring. It’s a great opportunity for students, if you know anyone who loves solving problems and would be a good fit please encourage them to apply.
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.