On with Theo / T3.gg

press, WordPress

On Thursday, a prominent developer, YouTuber, Twitch streamer, and journalist posted a video titled This might be the end of WordPress. It was very harsh. In that video you’ll hear him say about me, “he’s a chronic hater” (7:55), “seems like he’s been a pretty petty bastard for a long time now” (10:22), “I hate this shit, I hate when people are assholes and they get away with it because I’m doing it for the greater good, the fake nice guy shit. I’ll take an asshole over a fake nice guy any day, people whose whole aesthetic is being nice, I hated it.” (11:25), “Honestly I’d rather the license just be explicit about it than this weird reality of ‘If you get popular enough you can still use it but the guy who made WordPress is going to be an asshole to you.’ That seems much worse than most open source models.” (14:39)… it goes on.

Ouch!

However, one of my colleagues Batuhan is a follower of Theo’s and suggested I engage with him. It turns out we were both in San Francisco, and he was game for a livestreamed, no-conditions interview at his studio. I believe discussion is the best way to resolve conflict, that’s why my door is open to Lee Wittlinger, Heather Brunner, Brian Gardner, or any WP Engine or Silver Lake representative who wants to talk to resolve things.

Saturday afternoon I went to Theo’s studio, we had a vigorous two hour debate and discussion with some real-time chat polling that also changed my mind on a few things, and his, too. I left feeling like I had a new friend. ️And met some awesome cats. Check out the video.

Jay Z + Me

Gallery, Personal

I think it was Dustin Curtis who said something along the lines of “you can learn a lot about someone by their bucket list,” and he had posted his publicly recently. (Posting it is a great idea by the way, people will help you with it.) I began to think about mine, which was a little strange because I’ve been trying to move away from desiring things or experiences and just be more grateful in the present, but immediately a few music ones came to mind: have WordPress name-checked in a major hip-hop song, be in a rap video, and perform with one of my favorite artists (somehow).

It was less than a week later I got an email from a friend who was helping organize a hush-hush event where Jay-Z would sing his song Picasso Baby over and over 6 hours while interacting with various artists and an audience as a performance piece, and there might even be an opportunity to be one of the people he interacted with. My jaw dropped.

Continue reading Jay Z + Me →

Why Blog Posts Matter

Asides

Why blog posts matter — 91% of the people who came to the permalink for yesterday’s post visited WordPress.com to see the new design. Online advertising is usually thrilled to get a 1-2% clickthrough rate. This is why I believe that online advertising as we know it is going to have to change dramatically in the next decade, beacuse the folks who matter are blocking it out, emotionally and technically. The shifting of money is also going to be the biggest threat to people media (blogs, etc).

Twitter API

Web Standards

I think the opportunity has passed for the Twitter API to become a lingua franca for the real-time web. WordPress.com, Tumblr, Typepad, SocialCast, and Status.net all added support for the API in a way to make it as easy as possible for Twitter client developers — all they had to do was change the endpoint. The clients would then become a hub for users across different services, and had the ability to flourish regardless of the direction of the service they originally built on.

However because of perceived lack of market or a rush trying to keep up with each other and new features in Twitter’s API, like geo-location, we’re now close to half a year later and support for alternative endpoints in the major clients is haphazard at best. One of examples we all used to point to, Tweetie, is now owned by Twitter Inc. and doesn’t have much motivation to support other services in the future. Neither do the other official clients they’re rolling out. (Twitter.com/downloads is now a 404 page.)

For the record I completely support Twitter creating or buying official clients for every platform, including desktops. It’s what I would do in their position. However the third-party client developers that contributed immeasurably to Twitter’s success thus far are now in the awkward position of no longer being useful to their parent. It makes no sense for Twitter to have its user or signup experience mediated by a third party. None of the third-party clients have innovated enough in the user experience (for the most part they do not look or work significantly different from when they launched) or in cross-service support and flow.

If any of the clients had added seamless third-party API support when the opportunity first arose we’d all be pointing to them and promoting them. Now we’re more in a situation where, like Twitter, it makes more sense to build and promote our own because our users are demanding a multi-modal experience.

Kubrick Header Tool

Asides

I’ve noticed a lot of the blogs updating to 1.5 are using Kubrick, which is great, but a lot of blogs look the same now! Time to spice up your life a little with Owen Winkler’s awesome Kubrickr. What does it do? Well first you type in a word and it searches Flickr for all the photos with that tag and that have a Creative Commons license. Pick one of them, then it lets you choose which part of the photo you like and it crops the photo then gives you a download with the graphic to upload to your blog. How cool is that?

Six Apart and Live Journal

Asides,

I’m a little late to this, but the word is that Six Apart is buying LiveJournal. Congrats to the 6A and LJ teams! Big news, however you cut it. However, the question is: what exactly are they buying? LiveJournal has about 5.6 million accounts, but only about 2.4 million of these are active. That’s still pretty nice though, considering I imagine it’s about 24x what Typepad/Movable Type have now. Is it the technology? That’s already open source so they would have access to that anyway, and it’s Perl (which is 6A’s core competency) so I’m sure they could find they way around. (I wonder what will happen to the Open Source project after the dust has settled though?) That leads me to think it must be the people and engineers at LJ that 6A is after. Is this enough to position them against Microsoft and Google, as many have been suggesting?

98.6% of LiveJournal users don’t pay a thing, but that still gives 6A ~93,000 accounts paying $25/year. That revenue will be nice, especially since 6A has so many employees, but I don’t think it’s the coup most people are expecting. Remember the people who invested $10M in Six Apart are expecting it to be a quarter of a billion dollar business. It’ll be interesting to hear what the official word is on this, if and when an official word comes out. I’m probably missing something obvious. (And where is Yahoo in all of this? They better hurry up and buy someone too.)

29 Books in 2019

Books

As a follow-on to my lists in 2017 and 2018, here are the books I completed this year. I’ve linked all to the Kindle edition except the Great Mental Models, which is so gorgeous in hardcover you should get that one, and the The World is Sound isn’t available as an ebook. Bold are ones I particularly enjoyed or found myself discussing with others a lot.

  1. The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coehlo
  2. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
  3. No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe
  4. Imagine it Forward by Beth Comstock
  5. The Great Mental Models Vol. 1 by Shane Parrish
  6. Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright
  7. There Will Be No Miracles Here by Casey Gerald
  8. Less by Andrew Sean Greer
  9. Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
  10. nejma by Nayyirah Waheed
  11. Trust Exercise by Susan Choi (also on Obama’s book list, and based on the high school I went to, HSPVA)
  12. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford
  13. The Way to Love by Anthony de Mello
  14. The Fifth Agreement by Don Miguel Ruiz, Don Jose Ruiz, and Janet Mills
  15. Empty Planet by Darrell Bricker
  16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  17. How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elian Mazlish
  18. Make it Scream, Make it Burn by Leslie Jamison
  19. A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright
  20. Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind by Annaka Harris
  21. The World Is Sound: Nada Brahma: Music and the Landscape of Consciousness by Joachim-Ernst Berendt
  22. The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Jim Dethmer and Diana Chapman
  23. Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse
  24. Four Soldiers by Hubert Mingarelli
  25. Working by Robert Caro
  26. Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller
  27. Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  28. The Devil’s Financial Dictionary by Jason Zweig
  29. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell (also on Obama’s book list)

What’s interesting is that if you were to purchase every single one of those books, it would be about $349. You could get them all for nothing from your local library, even on a Kindle. The money I spend on books is by far and away the best investment I make every year — books expand my mind and enrich my life in a way that nothing else does.