John Medina, the author of one of my favorite books Brain Rules, is going to be at Automattic’s office tomorrow (Tuesday the 2nd) at 5 PM to have some after-work drinks and give a short talk. We’ve reserved some seats for the SF WordPress community to come by, and we even have free copies of his books for the first 30 people to show up. RSVP is required, so register here. Hope to see a few of you guys there!
Jane Kim Again
I first posted about Jane Kim in 2004, on my first visit to San Francisco. Fast-forward 6 years and she’s President of the School Board and going for District 6 Supervisor in tomorrow’s elections. If you’re in San Francisco, or know someone cool who is, check out her website and keep her in mind at the polls tomorrow. Tomorrow will also be my first time voting in person instead of by mail, which I expect to be annoying but worth it Update: And she won!
F.ounders Camp in Dublin
I attended the F.ounders Camp in Dublin, Ireland put on by Paddy Cosgrave. It included a lot of great folks from both sides of the pond, including Jack Dorsey and Michael Birch pictured here in this album.
Mashable Interview
Sarah Kessler at Mashable did an interview with me she’s posted under the title WordPress Founder on the Key to Open Source Success. We talk about capitalism, IPOs, how the internet has changed, and Open Source.
Adobe on WP
Adobe Migrates to WordPress, switching 1,200 blogs from Movable Type.
Automattic Becomes a Domain Registrar
As some folks have noticed already, Automattic is now a “real” domain registrar (ID #1531). This has been a goal of mine for several years now, chiefly because I am a bit of a domain collector myself and I’ve never been completely satisfied with the domain buying or management experience on any of the usual players. Second, custom domains are a popular feature on WordPress.com and should become even more popular with some changes we’re introducing this month and it’ll be good to be able to provide a fully integrated experience for our users there. It’ll be a few months while we build all the tools necessary to begin taking advantage of our registrar status so in the meantime we’ll continue to use Godaddy, who has been an excellent partner.
Price of Aid
Disturbing but worthwhile article in the New Yorker about how humanitarian aid can prolong and intensify conflict and strife. Link is just an abstract — anyone have a full copy?
FSF Profile
The Free Software Foundation has a new profile/interview of me on their site. The pull-quote: “Fundamental issues of freedom in software are fundamental issues in our lives, even if most people can’t see it.”
Email Graphs
The email levels on my contact page now show graphs when you click on them. I’ve found this new feature to be very motivating for me.
Experience Design
Blue Angels + Golden Gate Park
I snapped a few photos of the Blue Angels Fleet Week show on Saturday with a lens I’ve been waiting to try out, a 500mm f/4. It was really one of the coolest things I’ve seen, and the pictures turned out pretty well. Afterward went to Golden Gate park for Kevin and Coley’s wedding pre-party, and then back to my place for dinner.
Hipmunk
Hipmunk is a flight search tool with a twist, and even if you don’t travel as much as I do you should give it a try next time you’re taking a trip somewhere. (It’s hard to describe, but easy to use.) As announced elsewhere, I’m happy to be part of a group of people supporting the team as an investor.
Adam Savage On Problem Solving
Adam Savage of Mythbusters talks about how he solves problems, with an entertaining Q&A afterward. Hat tip: Paul Kedrosky.
Greatest Golf Photo
Saw this on Yahoo: Tiger Woods gives us the greatest golf photo you’ll ever see. Basically he mis-shot (which almost never happens) straight into a camera man who was taking a picture right that instant. Here are larger versions. I love how everyone is looking at the camera, Inception-like, and the guy with the cigar. “For camera buffs, Pain was using a Nikon D3S camera, with a 24-70 mm lens and a shutter speed of 1/1000 of a second.”
Offsite Redirects
A new upgrade launched on WordPress.com today, Offsite Redirects. Basically this allows you to retain all of your links, SEO, and visitors when you move from WP.com to self-hosted (or any platform, for that matter). I point it out only because I think it’s central to Automattic’s philosophy, and something I learned from Dave Winer: the easier you make it for people to go, the more likely they are to stay.
Email Load
I added a new feature to the contact page that shows you how high (or low) my email queues are, which update once a minute. If the levels are lower, it probably means I’ll get back to your sooner.
Seattle, Grist, Philippines
After a lovely weekend in New York I headed straight to Seattle, but not because of the Microsoft announcement like many people thought, but to attend a meeting for Grist, an environmental non-profit (with a sense of humor) whose board of directors I just joined. In addition to being a great organization to be involved with that has funny but important coverage, I hope to learn a lot more about the non-profit world and apply it to the WordPress Foundation. Tonight I leave for the Philippines where I’ll attend and speak at a WordCamp in Manila. I’m looking forward to the end of the year when things slow down.
MSN Spaces Closing, becomes WP.com
As just announced on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, Windows Live (formerly MSN) Spaces is shutting down and migrating their 30m+ users to WordPress.com. Four years ago I was fairly worried as every internet giant (Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, Google) had a hosted blogging service. Now only Blogger remains, and is firmly in our sights. I’ve been impressed with Microsoft’s regard for their users in providing a solid upgrade and migration path with a really smooth experience, which I think is in strong contrast to Yahoo’s 360 or AOL’s Journals. Given that this effectively doubles WordPress’s user base, there is a lot of work to be done still, but I’m excited by the challenge. 🙂 See also: official Windows Live post, official WP.com post, and 30+ other articles covering this on Techmeme.
Zuckerberg on Social
One thing that I think is really important — that I think is context for this, is that I generally think that most other companies now are undervaluing how important social integration is. So even the companies that are starting to come around to thinking, ‘oh maybe we should do some social stuff’, I still think a lot of them are only thinking about it on a surface layer, where it’s like “OK, I have my product, maybe I’ll add two or three social features and we’ll check that box”. That’s not what social is.
Social – you have to design it in from the ground up. These experiences, like what Zynga is doing or what a company like Quora is doing, I think that they have just a really good social integration. They’ve designed their whole product around the idea that your friends will be here with you. Everyone has a real identity for themselves. And those are fundamental building blocks.
From TechCrunch’s Interview With Mark Zuckerberg On The “Facebook Phone”.
Chartbeat
Chartbeat is a cool real-time analytics service I’ve been enjoying using for a while, especially from the iPhone app. As just announced yesterday on AllThingsD, I’ve joined their latest round of funding and I’m looking forward to see what they do next.