The Internet measures everything. And I am a slave to those measurements. After so many years of pushing much of my life through this screen, I’ve started measuring my experiences and my sense of self-worth using the same metrics as the Internet uses to measure success. I check my stats relentlessly. The sad truth is that I spend more time measuring than I spend doing.

Fantastic read over at Tweetage Wasteland : I Don’t Care if You Read This Article. Or put another way “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Hat tip: Mark Riley.

About.me and Wakemate

Audrey, Links

Today has been a very exciting day. First off, About.me has been acquired by Aol, as good friend Tony Conrad writes about on his blog. A great deal on both sides, I think Aol got a steal and a great team here. Second, one of Audrey’s earliest investments Wakemate has finally shipped their first version, which I’ve been using the past two nights and has been great. (I’m averaging 60 so far.) Reserve your Wakemate here.

Top Emailers 2008, etc

Personal, WordCamp

As an update to last year’s post:

  1. Toni Schneider — 1,052
  2. Maya Desai — 826
  3. Mom — 659
  4. Raanan Bar-Cohen — 452
  5. Donncha O Caoimh — 424
  6. Barry Abrahamson — 386
  7. Mark Riley — 222
  8. Jane Wells — 218
  9. Ryan Boren — 200
  10. Andrew Ozz — 197
  11. Matt Thomas — 193
  12. Liz Danzico — 148
  13. Mike Hirshland — 144
  14. Heather Rasley — 139
  15. Joseph Scott — 129

I’ve expanded the list to 15. A lot of the same folks at the very top, but new faces in Liz and Jane from 2.5 and 2.7 usability cycles. Also three people on the list have changed their domain in the past year, just like I did. It must have been a year for that.

Also for fun here are some yearly posting stats courtesy of Alex’s queries:

Posts Avg. Words Total Words Avg. Comments Total Comments
2002 360 139 50,190 1 390
2003 429 168 72,359 3 1,287
2004 990 54 54,257 6 6,236
2005 624 48 30,090 9 5,963
2006 313 70 22,010 11 3,503
2007 334 60 20,267 17 5,919
2008 302 50 15,206 21 6,493

As you can see I’m doing fewer posts with fewer words than ever, but getting more comments. At this rate I’ll be down to 40 words per post next year. Yay brevity. 😉

Working on collating some travel / WordCamp stats.

3.6 and State of the Word

WordPress

3.6 has been released and has a groovy video to go with it:

It’s been a busy week, WordCamp San Francisco 2013 went off without a hitch. Here’s the State of the Word presentation, which covered quite a bit of material and talks about the plans for WordPress 3.7 and 3.8:

And here’s the question and answer session:

There was a pretty good summary of the presentation in infographic form. A bit more about this next week, and some more announcements in store as well.

Paid Support

Akismet, Automattic, WordPress

We just launched the Automattic Support Network which is a place for companies to purchase paid support for WordPress and MU. Originally I didn't think we'd need to do this, simply because the WordPress.org support forums are so amazing and there is such a good community around it. That hasn't changed, but some big companies and enterprise folks are uncomfortable with volunteer support, and want (and insist) on paying someone before deploying a product. Based on that feedback and a lot of input from Podz, we put together this new product, which is basically VIP support with a guaranteed response time. Toni has some more thoughts here. We also rolled out new pricing for commercial Akismet use a few days ago, and the response has been great so far.

New York and Durham (Houston?)

Education, New York, Personal

Two reminders for upcoming appearances: This Saturday I’ll be presenting a 24-hour art collaboration with Evan Roth at Seven on Seven at the New Museum. On Monday I’ll be in Durham, North Carolina to speak at Duke University. If you’re interested in the latter, leave a comment and I’ll make sure you get the details. We don’t have a ton of room but I’d like ma.tt readers to be able to attend. After that I’ll be in Houston briefly if anyone wants to do a meetup.