Watching the Olympics parade thing out the corner of my eye, had never heard of Kiribati and found this snippet from their Wikipedia page interesting:

As sea levels continue to rise, the government of Kiribati is negotiating a deal with Fiji to evacuate the entire population to areas of Fiji that the Kiribati government would buy. The area of Fiji proposed for resettlement is the second largest Fijian island of Vanua Levu. The mass migration is expected to include younger, skilled workers first, and then the rest of the population would follow over a period of years.

That’s something you don’t hear every day.

Commercial Akismet

Akismet, Events, Spam, ,

Blog Herald asks about WP plugging a commercial project, namely Akismet. One of the lessons I learned from Ping-O-Matic is that web services like this can grow far beyond what you anticipated, need a lot of attention, and can be expensive to maintain. (Akismet has to be really fast otherwise it bugs people and delays commenting.) You also have a social contract with all of your users to continue to provide a service they’ve all come to rely on. When Akismet first got started, I wasn’t at all worried about the technology — I was using it myself and it worked great. I spent most of my brain cycles planning out how the service could be economically independent and self-sustaining in the future, so it could thrive and provide a great service to the public without relying on charity. I had to balance this with my desire to just give everything away (as I usually do).

I’m happy with where it eventually ended up. The Pro-Blogger limit was set very high and the vast majority (over 99.9%) of people use Akismet at no cost whatsoever. I’m able to justify devoting my time to the service while still putting bread on the table and the larger blogger community can stop dealing with disgusting spam on their blogs. The technology has scaled incredibly well and even before the Yahoo deal Akismet had a bright future. Also the API and the plugin itself is completely open so people could clone the API or modify the plugin if they wanted. The service just hit its first major milestone, has been embraced by the development community, and I’m confident now that it will continue as a public service. I think it’s also providing something pretty valuable, as evidenced by the people who have been buying Pro-blogger licenses just to support it, not because they fall under the commercial terms.

WordCamp San Francisco 2008 Photos

WordCamp, WordPress

Adam Tow got some great photos at WordCamp. Update: Here are mine. See also:

What about mine? Not quite yet.

Brazil Meetup

WordPress

I’ll be at the WordPress meetup at Latinoware tomorrow (Saturday) at 17:00. I’m speaking earlier in the day at 11:00. Been around the conference today and been really impressed with the breadth of subjects covered and the number of attendees. Confused about the logo though. (Is South America tucked into Africa?) Se você fala Português passar esta sobre a sua audiência.

Airport Security

Personal

It’s not that the terrorist picks an attack and we pick a defense, and we see who wins. It’s that we pick a defense, and then the terrorists look at our defense and pick an attack designed to get around it. Our security measures only work if we happen to guess the plot correctly. If we get it wrong, we’ve wasted our money. This isn’t security; it’s security theater.

Bruce Schnier on why airport security is A Waste of Money and Time in the New York Times.

Thirty Eight

Birthday, Personal

This is an unusually late birthday post (still backdated to January 11). I woke up on my actual birthday and was not feeling it. I was locked down even more strictly than January 2021 because I was trying to be extra cautious prior to a surgery my Mom had later in the month. I was also on a fairly strict diet and exercise regime after slipping into a weight range I wasn’t comfortable with.

So I was feeling extra isolated, had a strange pain in my lower back, and I just felt old all over. I thought of the Drake line, “I’m really too young to be feeling this old.” (Maybe originally from Garth Brooks?)

I meditated with a Daily Calm from Jeff Warren called “The Boggle,” which unfortunately I can’t hotlink but here’s how it starts: Sometimes we’re in the boggle, life is throwing everything at us: complicated situations, complicated relationships, we have all these feelings, all these impulses pulling us in different directions, and we have no idea what to do. No idea how to resolve it all. Even no idea what self-care strategy to implement right now. So what’s interesting about the boggle is that there’s the challenge of the situation itself, or situations, and there’s the added challenge of the confusion of it, the scrambling to make sense of everything. So we’re going to try something different, we’re going to stop scrambling and accept, even forgive, the boggle. We’re going to let ourselves be right here, inside any confusion, and take a break from trying to fix any of it. That’s the itinerary, let’s go. It hit close to home, and I’ve ended up returning to that meditation several times since.

The day really shaped up, though! Friends surprised me with a trip to a Teamlab exhibit at a museum that was closed on Tuesdays but they got opened up just for us. The museum was magical, but the best part was seeing friends I wasn’t expecting to, even if masked and relatively distanced. I wore a new comfy matching tie die outfit too, because, why not? Ended the day with a small dinner with Mom and three friends.

I don’t have any particular wisdom from this birthday except no matter how you feel, take some Advil and keep going.

This year on the personal side I’d like to take more silent retreats, get settled at home and out of liminal states, particularly construction projects, and listen to more operas. On the work side I’d like to set up alternative ecosystems for people tired of the traditional options for social with Tumblr, listening with Pocket Casts, and writing with Day One. (Update: A few weeks after my birthday I announced I’m working on Tumblr full-time.) Finally, I’d like to do my birthday post on time next year, but I’m forgiving myself for prioritizing friends and family that day. 😄

All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42.

Very honored to be on Time’s 30 under 30 list alongside some amazing folks across a number of fields. I only have about another month of being under 30, so good to be on these lists while I still can. 🙂

Whole Foods and Pseudoscience

Essays

Michael Schulson takes a great look at the contrast between Whole Foods and the Creationist Museum in Whole Foods: America’s Temple of Pseudoscience. It is a good reminder that we must try to use the best available data in decisions regardless of our preëxisting proclivities. Also good to check out is Grist’s series on GMOs, probably best summarized in What I learned from six months of GMO research: None of it matters or the NY Times A Lonely Quest for Facts on Genetically Modified Crops.

Do you know someone who is an amazing developer or designer? Someone who is passionate about helping people? An awesome lounge manager? Or maybe that person is you. Automattic is hiring for a variety of positions, and for all except two you can live and work wherever you like in the entire planet. There are also a number of other benefits; the main downside it’s a high performance culture and expectations are extremely high. Automattic hires the best folks regardless of geography, and we are especially looking for people right now outside of US timezones.

Published on CNN

Automattic, Meta, WordPress

Today a short piece “10 blogs to make you think” I wrote for CNN.com was published. I’m pretty excited about this and I also hope it drives a new audience to the blogs I mentioned, though to be fair if you’re not fascinated by how technology is changing society my picks might not be interesting. It’s a short piece in a “top ten” format, but I put a lot of thought into curating the picks.

I started blogging because I love writing. While the nature of Automattic is such that I’m writing all day long to communicate with my colleagues but writing for communication is different from the state of mind you’re in when you sit down to tell a story or change someone’s perspective. (Though perhaps it shouldn’t be.)

I started blogging for writing, I kept blogging for comments. It turns out what I love isn’t the act of writing itself, which has never come easy to me, but the conversation that happens afterward. Collectively in tech we become infatuated with each new medium be it blogs, widgets, social networks, micro-blogs, but in the end it always comes back to people talking to each other and eventually the novelty of the format fades.

As a final note when I write now I go into the WordPress editor because I know the auto-save will make sure my text is always safe, it produces clean and simple HTML, and I lean on After the Deadline. (Which now helps you rock the diaeresis New Yorker-style.)