Home Sweet Home

I’m back in San Francisco. This normally wouldn’t be a big deal, except I left at the beginning of December. It has been an exciting month, and I had the pleasure of meeting WordPress users from all over the world in person. I also learned a ton about efficient traveling and getting work done on the road. All great fun, but I am so happy to be back in my own place.

Foto Mateo

In the interest of expanding the Photo Matt audience we’ve commissioned a team of expert translators to create Foto Mateo. 😉 Update: To clarify, this is a joke. It just is a Google translate proxy of this site. Read the comments for more. Thanks for everyone who emailed in that it was, in fact, a very bad translation.

USPS and Speaker.gov

Jim Amos just wrote in that Campbell-Ewald launched a new WordPress-powered site for the US Postal Service, called Deliver Magazine. Congrats to Jim and Naoko McCracken! Ryan noticed the other day that Nancy Pelosi has a WordPress blog at Speaker.gov called The Gavel. Cool domain name, and good to see WP being used in the political realm, especially since none of the Presidential candidates for 2008 are using WP (yet). If you come across or instigate WordPress being used someplace cool, be sure to write in.

Irrational Finance

Two excerpts from Rational Irrationality: The real reason that capitalism is so crash-prone.

What boosts a firm’s stock price, and the boss’s standing, is a rapid expansion in revenues and market share. Privately, he may harbor reservations about a particular business line, such as subprime securitization. But, once his peers have entered the field, and are making money, his firm has little choice except to join them. C.E.O.s certainly don’t have much personal incentive to exercise caution. Most of them receive compensation packages loaded with stock options, which reward them for delivering extraordinary growth rather than maintaining product quality and protecting their firm’s reputation.

Here is another on financial innovation, which made me think of my bank post:

Limiting the development of those securities would stifle innovation, the financial industry contends. But that’s precisely the point. “The goal is not to have the most advanced financial system, but a financial system that is reasonably advanced but robust,” Viral V. Acharya and Matthew Richardson, two economists at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, wrote in a recent paper. “That’s no different from what we seek in other areas of human activity. We don’t use the most advanced aircraft to move millions of people around the world. We use reasonably advanced aircrafts whose designs have proved to be reliable.”