I went to Burning Man for the first time in 2013. It was an interesting experience, to say the least. It is probably the most visually stimulating place on the planet for the week it goes on, but I resisted the temptation to take too many photos and just tried to take it all in. I was mostly successful, here are some snaps I couldn’t resist taken over the course of a few days.
Jay Rosen (and Barry Eisler) on the surveillance state’s efforts to make journalism harder, slower, less secure. The gist: why would they destroy hard drives they know there are copies of, and detain couriers they know they’ll have to release?
Rachael Chong has an article on Fast Company Co.exist that includes my thoughts on giving, charity, and impact in the world.
I’m really excited about the launch of WordPress.com Connect. Yes Facebook et al offer similar APIs and have more users, but there are two key differences. First is Automattic is not an advertising-driven company, so our priorities around users are different than ones who are. Second is that these APIs are the basis for interacting with any element of an entire website hosted on WP.com or not, meaning themes, widgets, posts, content, CSS… any company that does something that ultimately ends up on a website should be looking at the APIs on developer.wordpress.com and pushing us where there isn’t one yet.
Anil Dash has A Brief History of Apple’s iWatch — a must-read if you follow tech news like I do.
Business Insider has a fun article on Automattic’s Awesome Remote Work Culture. Includes some quotes from me about how we work, including “Rather than being anti-office, we’re more location agnostic” and the top five meetup locations so far (Lisbon, Portugal; Kauai; San Francisco; Amsterdam; Tybee Island, Georgia).
Bruce Schneier on The Public-Private Surveillance Partnership. Packed with good links as well.
A lot of people have been asking about the playlist from WordCamp San Francisco last weekend, and thanks to some help from Rose here it is:
If you want to subscribe to it (or my other playlists on Spotify) I’ll be updating a bit throughout the year so we can have something fresh come 2014.
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.
Photos from WordCamp San Francisco Contributor Day 2013 taken by Sheri Bigelow, Kevin Conboy, and Aaron Hockley.
WordCamp San Francisco 2013 was wonderfully photographed this year by Sheri Bigelow, Kevin Conboy, and Aaron Hockley. (I didn’t take any of these.)
The 2013 Emmy nominations have been announced and included among the nominees is the Lift-built AMC The Walking Dead StorySync, which is nominated in the Outstanding Interactive Program category.
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 + MeSteve Denning writes convincingly on the crumbling myth of shareholder value as the primary driver of companies.
Naval describes the venture model while suggesting a way for firms to differentiate.
We help our customers but don’t tell them exactly how. Our core product is a commodity, yet we don’t disclose pricing. Even when we do, there are substantial hidden costs. It has to be bought in bulk, more than they want. We can take months to onboard a customer. We reject most of them but don’t actually give them a straight answer. They don’t get dedicated support. They don’t get to choose or replace their representative. We don’t commit to serve them in the future. We have hundreds of competitors with the same strategy. Now where’s my check?
I’ll be speaking three times this weekend: First Saturday at noon at Techweek Chicago, where I’ll be chatting with Bing’s Stefan Weitz. A few hours later at 4pm I’ll be at WordCamp Chicago doing a town hall. Then Sunday at 4pm I’ll be up with our Quebec friends at WordCamp Montreal doing another town hall. Then, I will sleep.
While at the D Conference last month I did an interview with Jason Calacanis for his This Week in Startups show, which I was actually last on in 2009. We went a little long so it was broken into two, here it is (WP Daily has an index of the questions):
The news came out this weekend on Mercury News and the Chronicle, so it’s worth addressing here: The Bay Lights, a public art project that uses San Francisco’s Bay Bridge as its canvas, is a project I’ve supported since I first heard of it and the idea captured my imagination. I was happy to make the first monetary donation when the project got started, and as of last week I was able to make a closing bookend donation for the remaining amount they needed, a bit above $1.5M. It was an honor to chip in along with the thousands of other supporters who have already donated to make the project a reality.
The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls. — Pablo Picasso
My hope is that over the next few years, and perhaps beyond that, the lights brighten people’s experience of San Francisco whether they see them every night or they’re one of the 16 million that visit the city every year. Hopefully that effect, however small, spreads to their other interactions long after the lights are off and the sun comes up. There are countless good causes around the world, some which I support regularly are listed on my about page, and I hope to have the opportunity to support many more in the future, but this close-to-home gift to a city that has given me so much seemed like the right thing right now.
If you haven’t seen them yet, here are the lights in action, more on the tech fixes happening to the lights on TBL, and photos I took climbing the bridge a few months ago:
David Cowan writes as A Contrarian Futurist, with thoughts on wearable computing and cyber warfare.
WP Daily has a post that is interesting both for the dozens of pictures of WordPress cakes and confections from yesterday as well as a good roundup of posts about the 10th anniversary.