Web 2.0 Conference

Asides, Events

Blogging may be light as I’ll be at the Web 2.0 conference and the surrounding activities the next few days. Since I couldn’t afford to attend it last year (a couple of grand is high for a college kid in Houston) I’ve been really looking forward to everything this year. I’m part of a workshop on “Open Source Infrastructure” at 9:45 AM, Wednesday. If you’re going to be at the conference I would love to meet you, so please don’t hesitate to introduce yourself!

High Traffic Sites

Asides

Just got this email, “I am the artist manager for Bob Ricci, famous parody artist. Our site www.BobRicci.com (http://community.bobricci.com) caters to more than 350,000 hits a day from fans worldwide. I wanted to let you know that in our years of being online and having to support such a large amount of global traffic WordPress.org is the only software we have found that is able to withstand the amount of traffic and offer us a community/news service in the online marketplace.” Sweet!

In Seattle

Asides

New York was a blast, but now I’m all the way on the other side of the country in chilly Seattle. There are apparently quite a few conferences going on here this week so booking a hotel was a nightmare, the selection was very limited, but on the plus side I ended up on one of the top floors of the Sheraton and the view is great. Gnomedex looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun and have a ton of good information. We’re going to do a WordPress BoF or party or open source bar or something, so put your name on the list on this page. I didn’t get to meet a whole lot of people in NY because my schedule was so tight, so hopefully I can catch up in Seattle.

Blog Census

Asides

Is anyone doing anything to replace or update the Blog Census? It still doesn’t count WordPress blogs, two years later, and that there are only 3 Textpattern blogs. Right now at Ping-O-Matic we have a database of over 5.6 million blogs, if anyone has a smart crawler I could throw at that list it’d be great to get a more realistic view of the State of the Blogosphere.

“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.

Mario and NUX

In this video Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka discuss World 1-1, or the very first level in the very first Super Mario Bros. It’s fascinating how every element on the level is designed to introduce you to a mechanic of the game, or how Mario moves and jumps. This is interesting if you like Mario, but also important for any developer in any medium who is thinking about the NUX (new user experience) of their product. I sometimes joke that in WordPress we put people on the boss monster level the first time they enter the dashboard. There have been improvements but still so much to do to naturally introduce people to our interface.

The official URL for Amazon’s new browser, Silk, is amazon.com/silk which right now redirects to amazonsilk.wordpress.com. This is not a VIP deal or anything, it’s just a free blog on WP.com which Beau noticed from their press release. I’m guessing they just wanted a quick and easy way to make a functional and beautiful website, which is kind of the whole idea of WordPress. 🙂

Tech blog idea: A site that covers the top headlines on Techmeme 6, 12, or 18 months after they happened, and explores the delta between what people said was going to happen when they raised funding, or did an acquisition, and what actually happens after time has run its course. We keep covering announcements like they matter. Can also compare analyst and commentator predictions for claim chowder.