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).
First day in Ethiopia
Visiting new drilling rig, in Charity: Water yellow, visited a village without clean water yet that’s going to get it later this year, played soccer in Abenaa (lost 2-1, but good game).
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.
Exploiting Democracy
One of my favorite talks from TED last week was by Laura Galante. The most hackable device on the planet is your own mind:
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.
Zoo Photos
A day at the zoo, yes I’m a little behind on photos. It’s only been 6 months!
How Twitter Works
How Twitter works in theory, by Kevin Marks. “Phatic” gestures are important to understand if you’re building on the web.
LinkRanks
It looks like LinkRanks have been owned, dominated by something call “deai.com.”
Jack Chenge writes on The Slow Web Movement.
Final day in Eygalières
Just puttering around the house and dinner.
Kindle Easter Eggs
Kindle Easter Eggs: We have GPS. (Sort of.) I’ve been using my Kindle heavily for a few weeks now and have a mini-review forthcoming.
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.
I found this post by Taylor Lorenz describing how aspiring influencers are posting fake, unpaid sponsored content to raise their status or hoping to nab a real sponsorship is totally bananas.
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.
Introducing the Distributed Podcast
I’ve been meeting with some brilliant people for Distributed, my new podcast dedicated to exploring the future of work. The first episode is a conversation with Stephane Kasriel, CEO of Upwork, about how they built a distributed culture, and how flexible work will shape the future of the global economy.
Unlike Automattic, Upwork does have an office in Silicon Valley (albeit one with a remote receptionist!). It was interesting to hear how Stephane’s teams balance in-person culture with inclusiveness for all employees, no matter where they live. Read more about Stephane’s work at Distributed.blog, and subscribe at Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.