After speaking at Yahoo earlier, I drove a few miles down the street to Google for MySQL Camp. I caught the last session of the day, by Googlers saying how they used MySQL internal to Google. (I assume for the Adwords application.) Here are the stream-of-talking notes I took. The most fascinating bits I took out of it is how they take a partitioning/sharding strategy similar (but notably different in some ways) to WordPress.com and that they use DNS to manage all load balancing, high availability, datacenter failover, etc. DNS is a pretty powerful building block.
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.
Guardian Profile
The Guardian UK story on Web 2.0 is now up, including a profile of me. They took some pretty funny pictures for this thing, I’d love to see the print version. I’m the one in the back with the crowbar.
Boxely Gone
I blogged about Boxely a few days ago, it seemed like a neat framework. I’ve been thinking more about the desktop the past month or so, hence my blogging around it. Joe has updated saying “Well, that was fun while it lasted. AOL has taken down the site already. Apparently not all executives in the company were aware of the release, and ordered it removed when they caught wind.” On the other side of the web Jason Calacanis is waving the AOL banner, yet a company that stifles innovation like this and flip-flops releases isn’t one I would invest in. Is this a continuation of Nullsoft-style rebels inside of AOL fighting to make a difference? Update: It’s back!
Firefox Followup: Parakey
Details have finally emerged about Blake Ross’ secret new project, Parakey. It gets to the meat on the third page.
“Although it looks like a Web site–down to the Firefox-style tabs that run across the top of the page, which each family member uses to display his or her own section–it is, in fact, something much more ambitious: a universal interface. Even though Parakey works inside your Web browser, it runs locally on your home computer, which allows Parakey developers to do things inside your Parakey site that a traditional Web site could not do, such as interact with your camera.”
It uses a new language called JUL. I haven’t found anything about Parakey online, besides Parakey.com registered about a month ago. Most disappointing quote from the article?
“If it were up to us, we’d open source all of it,” he says, “but it depends on how the investors want to do this.”
I’m guessing this might be a misquote. Investors are for money, advice, and connections, not product leadership. There are good examples now of scalable businesses being built on top of open source — don’t let anyone take you down a path you can’t believe in 100%. Think long term. I don’t know who Parakey’s investors are, but I’m sure Blake hooked up with (or could demand) folks smart enough to understand this.
Update: Blake says in the comments, “That is, indeed, a misquote. Parakey will be open source, as I repeatedly told the magazine while the article was being edited.”
Le Monde
The French newspaper Le Monde has moved all their blogs from Typepad to WordPress, if only I could read French.
BloggingPro Interview
Over the weekend I did an email interview with BloggingPro. Dropped a few hints about the future, so if you’re curious what’s in store for WordPress and Automattic check it out.
On PayPerPost
So I signed up for PayPerPost is Toni’s foray into the seedy side of paid blogging. Includes some interesting comments, including an ultra-defensive thread from one of their investors. I also came across a ton of creepy videos on Youtube, a lovefest for PayPerPost and apparently those are $10 a pop. There is a firm that does something similar in real life, Buzz agents or something, but they’re actually fairly respectable simply because they require one thing: the agents to say that they’re being paid. End of story. I have no problem with bloggers making money, but that info out there and let people make up their own mind.
Another way to think about it: If PayPerPost was PayPerComment instead, and they paid people to leave comments shilling various products or services, what would you call it? What if they paid people to email their friends about something without disclosure? Would someone start an anti-PayPerPost Akismet, or a Firefox extension to detect and highlight people using them?
WordPress Firefox Extension
I think a WordPress Firefox extension (add-on) would be pretty cool, I have a ton of ideas for it but I’m curious what you guys would like to see in it. What would make blogging easier for you? Any talented FF extenders who would like to take on the project and get paid?
Alexa Moving
I wonder what’s going to happen to the wordpress.com Alexa, now that we have domain mapping and most of the highest-traffic blogs will move to their own domains.
MU Goes Gold
Just announced the 1.0 release of WordPress MU, and also put a plug for bbPress in there. Releasing feels so incredibly good, it’s almost indescribable. We should do it more often. 🙂
NY WordPress Meetup
Hasselhoff Inteview
On the move: David Hasselhoff. Hat tip: Donncha.
SlimDevices Goes To Logitech
Om says SlimDevices has been sold to Logitech. I currently have 3 of their Squeezboxes around my house and love them, I syncronize the audio so no matter what room I’m in the music is the same. Logitech is another one of my favorite companies, or at least one of the ones I give all my money to. I’m a mouse and keyboard junkie, trying new ones whenever there’s a good upgrade. I’ve been bouncing between Microsoft and Logitech, but the new Revolution series mouse with the frictionless scroll has got me hooked, laptop and desktop version. Two companies I like getting together. 🙂
Spammers Hack Blogs
Blog spammers have sunk to new lows.
Nivi, a blog I’m subscribed to, was showing dozens and dozens of entries being updated even though there was no discernible difference. However as I started looking closer, I noticed if you view the source, for example on this post, there is are ton of spam links there. You can click the screenshot to the left.
The implications of this are disturbing. His blog was hacked (which isn’t unusual and could have been for a thousand reasons like another account on his server being hacked, and old version of phpBB or other software) but instead of doing anything obvious to disturb the content of the site they invisibly modified his posts using CSS-hidden text. He has probably had hundreds of posts modified. I can’t imagine cleaning it up will be pleasant.
Toni Interview Video
Anonymous Blogging
Anonymous Blogging with WordPress.com and Tor, by Ethan Zuckerman. Hat tip: Lorelle.
Tailrank
The new Tailrank is live, and looks like a huge improvement. Tailrank is like Google News but powered by blogs.
Boxely
Boxely is live, it’s like XUL but simpler and easier.
bbPress Goes Gold
The big news today is bbPress 0.72 “Bix” has been released, the first officially released version of the blazingly fast forum software 2 years in the making. It includes some of the things WordPress has become well-known for, like spam protection, easy extensibility, and WP-like customization.