Great interview of the guy running Hotmail, he talks a lot about the scaling of megaservices and some of the concerns of managing tens of thousands of boxes. What would you give to hear a similar interview by his counterpart at Google or Yahoo? Fascinating read.
I travel back and forth between Japan and the United States, mostly Tokyo and New York and a few other American cities, several times a year. The contrast is jarring. Arriving in the US can feel like rolling back a decade or more, returning to a time when information was scarce, infrastructure was creaky and basic services such as ground transportation were chaotic and unreliable.
Roland Kelts on What the west can learn from Japan’s “lost decades.” This echoes a lot of my experience there recently, and I had the good fortune of meeting Roland as well.
Bloggies
The bloggies are now open, and for the first time ever WordPress is a nominee. However there is very good company like Blogger, Flickr, and Delicious. Flickr! My fav thing about the bloggies has always been the discovery aspect, finding blogs I had missed somehow. This year contains quite a few gems and I’d recommend going through everything and exploring a few you haven’t seen before.
WordPress in its Terrible Threes
Mike Little points out that WordPress is three years old today. 🙂 Who woulda thunk it? Mike and I met in person for the first time just a few weeks ago, here’s a picture Khaled took of the event.
Funnel Cloud Photo
One of my sister’s photos was on Digg, randomly.
BlogTalk Reloaded
I’ll be keynoting at BlogTalk Reloaded in Vienna, Austria on October 2-3rd. Hopefully I’ll meet a few WordPress users while I’m over there.
Google Irony
John Battelle – The real irony…. Alex Bosworth – Google’s Doublespeak. (Isn’t Alex their CTO’s brother? That’ll make for an interesting Thanksgiving dinner discussion.) I loved Google not just because of their great technology, but because they sold me a dream. Something bigger and better than just another company. Something inspiring and with soul.
From Within
Michel Camilo & Tomatito – From Within, from a fantastic CD given to me by Luis Rull when I was in Spain. It starts off slow and then becomes really intense, a beautiful song.
Awesome Oobjects
Oobject is “Billboard charts for gadgets” and a great example of using WordPress as a CMS. It’s from David Galbraith.
Free Sun Server
I put in an application for a free Sun server to try out for either WordPress.com or Ping-o-Matic, depending on when/if it arrives. Everything we’ve done on WP.com has been Dell thus far, and honestly they’ve been pretty good with the exception of one box that they’re going to replace soon. Our biggest DB server (a Dell 6850) does north of 300 queries per second, but it weighs as much as me and uses a crazy amount of power, which is expensive. Of course as more and more of our infrastructure becomes distributed, high performance boxes don’t matter as much.
Features Don’t Matter
Why Features Don’t Matter Anymore. I think similar things when I hear “But CMS X has hundreds more features than Y! Why don’t we have more users?”
Front Row
WOW. The new Front Row remote control feature is amazing. I can’t believe this hasn’t gotten more coverage. If I had a TV, this would make a fantastic digital hub. Actually it looks pretty darn good on a regular monitor.
Dell vs. Sun
The Sun Doesn’t Shine for Me, or why Dell is kicking Sun’s butt. I can attest to a similar experience, except that I gave up long before Jason did.
Akismet for Movable Type
We’ve released a Akismet for Movable Type plugin and the response from testers thus far has been very good. John Battelle blogs about it here: Akismet for MT: Death to Spam. Also check out this post by Jeff Nolan. “I was spending up to 45 minutes a day cleaning it up.”
Gas Stations for Flying Cars
Open Thread: Social Web & Its Challenges . “building floating gas stations for the flying cars”
We are here because the editor of this magazine asked me, “Can you tell me what code is?”
Paul Ford’s amazing What is Code? for Bloomberg. I only spotted one mistake, of course from the Taupe Blazer guy: you’re never at the limits of WordPress.
Thomas Dolby, Hot Air, and Southwest
Tons of people have been writing in about some new WordPress blogs, so to roll them into one post: Thomas Dolby the noted musician has a new WP blog, a new conservative video blog from Michelle Malkin called Hot Air, and finally closest to my heart is Southwest Airlines new one.
Conventional RSS
Alex from Textpattern has started putting thoughts down on what we’re calling “conventional RSS.” It’s not a spec, profile, or anything like that. It’s just a documentation of the things we do in our RSS 2.0 feeds. There are some minor differences with what WP currently does, but at least in the beginning WordPress and Textpattern will have a shared set of conventions and assumptions.
How Tesla Will Change The World from the great Wait But Why.