Washington Is Killing Silicon Valley, an editorial from the Wall Street Journal. The main thing the article misses is that while the economics of startups are currently distorted doing a startup is still one of the best ways to change the world, for your work to have an impact far beyond the walls of a single company. I’ve seen some killer startups recently, my only hope is that they have enough runway to make it to the execution of their idea. Entrepreneurship.gov says “Freedom is just another word for entrepreneurship.”
Friendster Switches
Friendster Relaunches Blogs, Switches to WordPress MU. Basically Friendster has switched millions of blogs from Typepad to WordPress, presumably at least partly because Six Apart abandoned their Typepad platform for third parties starting in late 2006 with Le Monde.
Art Direction Plugin
WordPress “Art Direction” Plugin, from Automattician Noel Jackson. Basically allows you to do what Jason Santa Maria does for his blog without all the custom code and template hacking, just a simple plugin.
WordPress Interface History
A Journey Through Five Years of WordPress Interface. Take a look at what the WordPress interface looked like at the beginning of 2008. How far we’ve come!
WordCamp SF 2009
WordCamp San Francisco 2009 will be on May 30, 2009.
Entertainment Gathering Day 2
Day two of Entertainment Gathering.
Entertainment Gathering Day 1
First day at the Entertainment Gathering 2008 in Monterey.
2.7
WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” is live to the world. So many people put so much into this release, all I can really say is “thank you.”
Check out the release video:
Most Annoying Economic Crisis
Inside the world’s most annoying economic crisis, on a shortage of coins in Argentina. “Factoring in the 50 centavos he had already handed over, this effectively reduced the fare to 13.50 pesos, which, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment, is actually more than 14.50 pesos.” Hat tip: Paul Kedrosky.
Houston & Dubai
I’m going to be in Houston for Christmas and while there attending the December Refresh Houston Meetup. If you’re in Houston, come by and say hi. After that I’m going to Dubai for a little bit of vacation, but if there are any WordPress users there I’d love to meet up one night. I’ll be there the Dec 28–Jan 4.
Learn Faster
Gas Stations for Flying Cars
Open Thread: Social Web & Its Challenges . “building floating gas stations for the flying cars”
Open Source Economy
Three Reasons Open Source Will Save The Economy. Only three? I bet we could think of way more. 🙂
Scoble Interviews
I had the pleasure of chatting with Robert Scoble last week. In addition to him getting me to sign up for FriendFeed, we chatted a bit on camera about social media, the future of blogs, advertising, and of course WordPress.
Here’s part one, at 21 minutes.
Here’s part two, at 17 minutes.
Thanks to Robert for taking the time out to chat, as always it was a pleasure.
Sydney Beaches
In Sydney, Australia around a number of beaches including Bondi, with Sam and friends.
Sydney Zoo & Opera House
A day at the famous Sydney Zoo, including the open air bird show and a yawning tiger. Dinner across from the opera house.
WordCamp and Artist Party
The second day of WordCamp followed by a birthday a vintage-themed party for two local artists / performers. Includes famous Sam Bauers tango dance.
WordCamp AU
WordCamp Australia at the Red Box in Sydney, and dinner afterwards (including an arm wrestle).
Around Sydney
Arriving in Sydney, NSW Art Gallery, and dinner at Sands Bistro on Coogee before WordCamp AU.
Intensely Automattic Change.gov
Everyone is honored and excited today that Change.gov, the website of President Elect Barack Obama, has turned on IntenseDebate comments to discuss things like health care.
Micah Sifry has an excellent write up of the topic.
Imagine what happens if those numbers–on not just any “centralized site” but the one that symbolically and perhaps literally has the attention of the President-elect–start climbing into the five- and six-digits. Before our eyes, we are witnessing the beginning of a rebooting of the American political system. [emphasis added]
[…]
By using IntenseDebate (and the OpenID framework), the Obama transition is actually enabling a lot of interesting community development to start happening beneath the surface of a threaded discussion. Users get their own “commenter profile” on IntenseDebate, along with reputation points, and they can carry those profiles onto other sites that use the same system. Users can also choose to follow other IntenseDebate users, so if someone is really diligent they could start to gather a group or a crowd around them.
It has even started to make the cable news, as evidenced in this clip.
Pretty exciting! And it’s also a reaffirmation of Automattic’s platform-agnostic approach to Akismet, Gravatar, PollDaddy, and IntenseDebate that although Change.gov uses Expression Engine for their CMS they’ve chosen IntenseDebate for their comments.