Ryan is doing the WP meetup in Dallas tomorrow. I’ve been busy at work and forgot that was this weekend, I think we’re too late to do the official Meetup thing but I’d be willing to meet some San Francisco WordPress people for coffee tomorrow afternoon.
Digg Effect Deconstruction
The Digg Effect: A Deconstruction, with a WordPress blog of course.
Chamath on Growing Facebook
This is a cool talk from Chamath Palihapitiya from a few years ago in 2013 which makes it extra interesting. It seems like a smaller audience so it’s fun and unguarded. (Though a great thing about Chamath is he’s incredibly candid in every context.) You can’t see the slides in the video, and there’s not much to them, but here they are:
Facebook's Growth Hacker on how they put Facebook on the Path to 1 Billion Users from growthhackersconference
Here are the values he talks about at the end:
- Very high IQ.
- Strong sense of purpose.
- Relentless focus on success.
- Aggressive and competitive.
- High quality bar bordering on perfectionism.
- Likes changing and disrupting things.
- New ideas on how to do things better.
- High integrity.
- Surrounds themselves with good people.
- Cares about building real value over perception.
The three biggest myths about women in technology, by Allison Scott and Freada Kapor Klein. Hat tip: Mitch Kapor.
“But with the Zuccotti Park encampment removed, and the opera closing on Dec. 1, is that it for Gandhi in New York? Or is it worth asking, what would Gandhi do in the world today?” What Would Gandhi Do? in the New York Times.
Technorati Tag API is Broken
The Technorati Tag API is Broken, or so asserts Kevin Burton. The post is a little old and the comments don’t seem to have gone anywhere. I think the tag having to appear in the URI is a weakness, and a restriction that isn’t reasonable under many hosting enviroments. That said, my understanding of rel="tag" is that they don’t have to link to Technorati at all, they can link to your own taxonomy and not Google bomb key terms. (As WordPress does in 1.5.) You don’t even really need to use the links, since they spider categories and dc:subject from RSS feeds anyway, but if you do tag you posts using the link method, it might be worth using nofollow.
Friend and HSPVA alum Robert Glasper’s new album Black Radio is out today and has so far been well-received by a great feature in the New York Times and on NPR. You can grab the album on iTunes ($7) or on Amazon ($9).
Zoo Photos
A day at the zoo, yes I’m a little behind on photos. It’s only been 6 months!
On Tekzilla
I was on Tekzilla Episode 92, interviewed by the lovely Veronica Belmont.
LinkRanks
It looks like LinkRanks have been owned, dominated by something call “deai.com.”
Talking Points Memo interviewed New York Times media columnist David Carr and I loved this quote:
You don’t have to be able to code yourself, but you have to know what coding is. You should be able to work in Final Cut Pro. WordPress should be second-nature. I think, in generational terms, being able to produce and consume content at the same time.
Check out the rest of the interview on the state of media and journalism.
Tahoe Pics
A day in Tahoe, everything from snow on the beach to blue steel to flying dirt and gorgeous rocks and water. Oh, and of course a little shameless self-promotion.
IBM Goes Non-Remote
Like Yahoo a few years ago, IBM, an early pioneer of distributed work, is calling workers back to the office.
The shift is particularly surprising since the Armonk, N.Y., company has been among the business world’s staunchest boosters of remote work, both for itself and its customers. IBM markets software and services for what it calls “the anytime, anywhere workforce,” and its researchers have published numerous studies on the merits of remote work.
If “IBM has boasted that more than 40% of employees worked outside traditional company offices” and they currently have 380,000 employees (wow), then that’s 152k people on the market.
As I said when Yahoo did the same, it’s hard to judge this from the outside. A company that was happy about how they’re doing wouldn’t make a shift this big or this suddenly. It’s very possible the way distributed folks were interacting with their in-office teams wasn’t satisfactory, especially if they were forced to use subpar in-house tools like SameTime instead of Zoom or Skype. Yahoo didn’t have the best trajectory after they made a similar move, and hopefully IBM isn’t going to follow the same path.
In the meantime, Automattic and many other companies are hiring. If you aren’t going to work in a company’s headquarters, it is probably safest to work at a company that is fully distributed (no second tier for people not at HQ) rather than be one of a few “remote” people at a centralized company.
Clunker Broadband
Nifty Corners
A different way to do rounded corners, for that chic Blogger look. Hat tip: Phil.
100k and Counting
WordPress 100,000 Party, and here’s the Evite. This is going to be a lot of fun. 🙂
Bay Area
Only in the Bay area: Last night I was down at the Mountain View In-n-Out Burger enjoying a double and chocolate shake when I ran into Paul Martino, CTO of Tribe, and his lovely wife. We were both on the “Open Source Infrastructure” panel just last week. Tribe is doing some neat things with open data and standards, it’s time to check them out again.
Meeting Ben
While in Florence I had the pleasure of meeting Ben Hammersley who took us to have real Tuscan food, which apparently involves parts of a cow you wouldn’t normally expect to eat. We chatted about a whole range of topics and I learned quite a bit about everything from solo polar expeditions to DNA hacking.
Music Photo
I just put up this old photo of some Charlie Parker music.
Open Source Usability
Open Source Usability: The birth of a movement. Mentions the usability review in the comments. At the next FLOSS Sprint Eugene has asked for WordPress to be one of the main projects.