WP.com in Red Herring

Asides, WordPress, WordPress.com

Just landed in Houston, it’s chilly here. The opening up of WordPress.com got a nice write-up in Red Herring earlier today. Just to clarify two things from the article quickly: I’m working on WP.com with Andy, Donncha, and Ryan and I do think our distributed database architecture (which I’ll write more about later, it’s nothing too fancy) will help us scale cheaply but I’m also a strong believer in big things from small teams, much in the spirit of 37signals.

Thanksgiving Travel Tip

Asides

Just a tip for people traveling this week: get there early! I got there when I normally would (45-60 minutes before) and didn’t make it, thanks mostly to standing in the wrong line twice. Airports are in need of a usability designer far more than any software I’ve used in the past year. I generally fly a few times a month, so I’m not exactly a novice, but this is the first time I’ve been in the middle of the Thanksgiving rush.

GBase and Wikipedia

Asides, Google, Wikipedia

I’ve seen a lot of people suggest with Google Base they’re competing with Craig’s List and eBay, but I see it much more as a play against Wikipedia. When I chatted with Jimmy Wales he said one of their biggest problems was for things that are relatively structured like the wiki dictionary or quotes having hte data in a totally unstructured wiki format makes it hard to work with. He suggested they would go the direction of mediawiki templates and microformats, which is great to hear. Google has come at it from the other direction, giving you a free-form DB to pour your heart into. I guess the question is, will people become as passionate about distribution (what Google promises) rather than working for the greater good of humanity through the Wikipedia.

Note to Self

Asides

Two things I’m going to blog publicly to get myself to finish them faster: First off, I really need to finish up the Automattic site so you guys can see some of the cool stuff we’re doing there. Second, I’ve been playing with some cool gadgets lately and developing some pretty strong opinions about them which I’d like to start posting and sharing.

IP4IT Wrap-up

Asides

I only made it to the IP4IT conference on Tuesday and flew back that night but it was actually quite well-done so next time I’m going to try and make more of it. My panel in particular was great fun, with Jimmy Wales (who blogged it! I can die happy now.), Peter Saint-Andre, and Christopher Dean. The conversation at lunch was just as interesting, straying toward identity systems and dealing with web spam. The Wikipedia has fairly sophisticated ways to deal with spam, it sounded like there could be some interesting ways to work with Akismet as well. On the trade show floor I met some guys from Coyote Point Systems, which has a terrible website but their products sound very interesting and are a third to a quarter the price of similar offerings from F5 or Alteon. Anyone have experience with them?

Asynchronous Voice IM

Asides, Ideas

I wonder what a true voice IM clent would look like. The beauty of I’m that is lost in clients like Skype is it’s impossible to maintain several asyncronous near real-time conversations at once. You can hear this problem is you ever listen to a taxi radio. Perhaps when you focus different windows it could catch up on the discrete voice clips since the last time you were on that window. The whole chat UI could be a button you hold down while speaking, like a HAM radio.

In Las Vegas

Asides, Travel

After a near-miss and frantic rush this morning the American West flight to Las Vegas was great, the pilot did a small deteour after leaving SFO that took us around the coast of San Francisco and over Fisherman’s Wharf right as the sun was coming up, it was one of the more beautiful things I’ve seen in my life. San Francisco is just one of those magical places and I’m grateful for every day I spend there. Now I’m in Las Vegas and it’s surprisingly nippy, I might end up getting one of those awful tourist sweatshirts to stave away the chills. Wifi in McCarran airport is free and fast.

Lucky Orbitz

Asides, Travel,

I just booked a flight to Vegas for the IP4IT conference, where I’m on a panel with Mr. Wikipedia Jimmy Wales, and the Orbitz waiting graphic popped up a talk bubble that said “Say hi to lady luck for me.” How nice! It’s little things like that which make me use Orbitz more and more, not to mention the prices it gives me are great. I’m not looking forward to booking a Thanksgiving ticket to Houston, though. (BTW, if there are any Vegas WP users drop me an email and we may be able to get together, though I’m only there for the day.)

Google Analytics

Asides, Google

Google Analytics is what I’ve been saying a search engine should have done years ago, provide hosted stats to any website that uses it. People love stats so this will get huge uptake, and probably provide Google really invaluable information. A year or so ago I hoped Technorati would do this for blogs, but they probably saw it as outside their core business. Interesting note: this is the first stat tracking javascript I’ve seen that validates as XHTML Strict. Good job, guys. (Most examples leave the language attribute.)