Leaving CNET

It was just about a year ago I blogged about leaving Houston and driving across the country to join CNET. It ended up being one of the best moves of my life. Since moving to the Bay Area I’ve had incredible oppurtunities and met a whole tribe of amazing people. For what I’m passionate about, I really believe this is the best place in the world to be.

For me the last year has really been about learning. From school in Houston to CNET to the explosive growth of WordPress and Ping-O-Matic, it’s been an incredible ride. There have been plenty of mistakes along the way, but all-in-all I don’t mind because that’s when I learn the most. At CNET I was lucky enough to be surrounded by veterans of the industry whose success and perserverance through the thick and thin of creating what we know as the web had a deep impact on me. CNET also gave me incredible flexibility to work on WordPress, and has embraced WP all over their organization, it was really the ideal gig.

However in the back of my mind I was wondering if I could focus on my passions full-time, to put more daytime hours into the community and projects that have changed my life already. I don’t need much, and working on WordPress full-time is my idea of heaven. I gave notice (they’ve been incredibly supportive).

I could say this was a hard decision, but the truth is I can’t imagine myself doing anything else.

Watch this space, I’ll have plenty more to talk about in the next few weeks. I’m very excited about the things happening with WordPress.com, WordPress.org, bbPress, a WordPress non-profit, Ping-O-Matic, and a few projects so shiny they don’t even have names yet.It’s a little scary to be leaving the safety net, but nothing worth doing in life is without risks.

My last day at CNET is Friday, October 21.

If there is ever going to be a time in my life to take big risks and reach for the brass ring, now is it.

Thumb recovering, now flu

Well the good news is my thumb seems to be recoving, though I’m still keeping it in a splint because it’s really sensitive. The bad news is a few days ago I came down with some sort of cold/flu or strep throat (going to doctor again tomorrow) that has really knocked me out. Maybe it’s the same thing as Om Malik and Matt Marshall. (Someone should do a Web 2.0 mashup of blogs, event calendars, and Google maps to identify Patient Zero.) The only thing that has allowed me to stay concious and not fall too far behind is Tylenol Sore Throat, which is one of the most amazing painkillers ever. My sister was in town and bought this for me and it has been magical, though it tastes awful. One of the biggest problems with sore throats is I don’t eat or drink because it hurts too much, which then gets you dehydrated and sicker. With TST I’m able to get some food and drink down and it also helps with the fever. Hopefully within another day or two this will run its course.

Out of Commission

I’m going to be a bit slow or absent on blogging and email for a few days because I’ve injured my left hand and my thumb is in a splint which makes it pretty tough to type. (One-handed mostly.) There is a ton I want to write about, but the doctor said pushing it too hard might aggrevate the injury, so it’ll mostly have to wait. To keep things interesting around here I’ll send a WP.com invite to whoever comes up with the best story about how I did it.

Weblogs.com Sold, Ping Outlook Bleak

Verisign, which does not have a particularly good history in the blogosphere, has purchased Weblogs.com. This leaves Ping-O-Matic as the only large-scale and independent ping relay service left. (Blo.gs was sold to Yahoo earlier in the year.) I can definitely see why Dave did this, he has probably found as I have that keeping up with the spammers exploiting the service requires a fair amount of daily effort, and I’m sure he has more interesting things to work on. People have been talking about this for months now, and while I was skeptical before I suppose it shouldn’t come as too big a surprise.

I’ve been trying to pin down in my mind why this deal just feels sketchy, like when you find out that nice girl you went to school with is engaged to the class bully. It just doesn’t feel like a healthy, long-term relationship. When blo.gs was sold to Yahoo it was an open-source and technically robust service being supported by a growing company full of smart people who really get the Web. The transition of blo.gs has had some bumps along the way, but it’s obvious that Yahoo is operating it for its intrinsic value to their other services, not trying to move their bottom line or impress investors with the buzzword “blog” in their next quarterly report. (Look at how all the press is saying things about RSS, even though it is only tangentially connected with RSS. Not an accident.) Weblogs.com is an older service that has stagnated for a while being lost to a company with a history of evil and a declining business with plans to embrace, extend, and monetize what should be a public service.

We should have been better prepared for this. Earlier in the year Verisign had the Boston Consulting Group calling people in the space trying to pick their brains, while at the same time refusing to reveal who they were working for. (Shady.) The “real time web” group also took me to dinner at one point and outlined their view for a “value-added” ping ecosystem (with Verisign in the middle, of course). Every major content producer and every company relying on the ping stream should be very worried about this move.

Other people have gotten so frustrated with the ping mess they’ve abandoned the existing ping community and standards and decided to produce their own feeds in a corner and let everybody come to them. In a format different from the over-hyped Feedmesh, no less, and with no discussion on that group. (As an aside, if the Livejournal stats match what their front page says, which looks like it would be 5-15 pings per second, that would be well within the means of Ping-O-Matic to handle in addition to its current load.) The state of the ping community is fairly bleak

What do we need to keep a BigCo from exploiting this space? A free, open, non-profit, and stable alternative supported by a consortium of organizations who understand that value should be built on top of pings, not in front of them. Ping-O-Matic is not this today, though the seeds of it are there in the servers and services Textdrive and Technorati to make the service 1000% more reliable than it was. Getting competing services to work together is never easy, but I fear if we don’t Verisign is going to successfully exploit the situation.