I’m very excited to have been selected to join the Henry Crown Fellowship Class of 2017. Many, many folks I admire including Reed Hastings, Kim Polese, Cory Booker, Aileen Lee, Stephen DeBerry, Deven Parekh, Chris Sacca, Tim Ferriss, Reid Hoffman, Scott Heiferman, Troy Carter, Bre Pettis, Lupe Fiasco, and Alexa von Tobel have been through the program in previous years, and several of those people have spoken highly of it to me. I’m excited to meet and get to know the rest of the 2017 class, and embark on a learning journey alongside them.
Apple Announcements
Well the Shuffle and mini look pretty rocking, and both seem absolutely something I’d want to by. The Shuffle fits my listening habits pretty well and the mini looks like it could make a pretty swank gateway server for my living room. (I have a big beige box running Gentoo in there now.) Hook up two big external drives and you’re good to go. In other news, the official Apple WordPress Student blog has been pretty busy lately. When the story about it first broke there wasn’t a whole lot of content up there, but now it has filled out nicely.
Phil is Back
Phil Ringnalda is back! Oh, and read what he wrote about centralized subscription service. The consensus seems to be forming around the feed: faux protocol, with the MIME camp strangely silent.
Harley WordPress
I just heard that Harley Davidson is going to be using WordPress internally. Groovy!
Dallas Meetup
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.
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.
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.
Zoo Photos
A day at the zoo, yes I’m a little behind on photos. It’s only been 6 months!
Kids are All Right
My friend Liz Welch recently finished up her new book with her siblings, The Kids are All Right. “Well, 1983 certainly wasn’t boring for the Welch family. Somehow, between their handsome father’s mysterious death, their glamorous soap opera star mother’s cancer diagnosis, and a phalanx of lawyers intent on bankruptcy proceedings, the four Welch siblings managed to handle each new heartbreaking misfortune together. But all that changed with the death of their mother. While nineteen year-old Amanda was legally on her own, the three younger siblings—Liz, 16; Dan, 14 and Diana, 8—were each dispersed to a different set of family friends.” I just ordered it on my Kindle.
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.
LinkRanks
It looks like LinkRanks have been owned, dominated by something call “deai.com.”
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.
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.
Nifty Corners
A different way to do rounded corners, for that chic Blogger look. Hat tip: Phil.
Stay On Target
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.
Gallery: series1
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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.