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.
Entertainment Gathering 08
Tim said it better than I could, but I’m also very much looking forward to attending Entertainment Gathering this year. I was there covering the event last year and it was a huge creative recharge and very inspiring.
My favorite story from last year was at lunch I noticed this amazing looking device that was totally readable in broad LA daylight sitting on a table. I was gawking at it and a voice behind me said “Pick it up! You can play with it.” It was Jeff Bezos with his trademark laugh and the device was a Kindle. He gave a personal demo and I was sold, I pre-ordered one as soon as I got online and have loved it ever since. (Except it’s broken now, but that’s another story.) Registration is currently open here.
Cooking Tsatziki
If you ever wanted to see me talking about cooking, specifically tsatziki, or in an apron. (Which is probably the most complex thing I could make.) Luckily I had some professional help. Thanks to KTEH for the opportunity.
TwitterFE
Rewriting Twitter for web best practices. It has some rough edges, but pretty neat.
Wall Street’s Boom
“The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.” — The End of Wall Street’s Boom.
Apple HDCP
StartUP on Current
There’s a cool 10 minute piece covering TechStars on Current TV. They were filming the day I was there talking to the companies so I have a cameo appearance a few times.
Two Thunderbird Extensions
I find there are two extensions that I install for Thunderbird every time I set up a new computer. The first is Plaxo for Thunderbird, which does a pretty good job at syncing contacts. The second is Messagefaces with Gravatar support turned on, which you can find in Add-ons > Options > Online Services. (Wish it was on by default, it doesn’t really work without it.) Plaxo has an avatar feature but I turn it off because way more people have Gravatars than Plaxo avatars.
NYTimes Sleep
3 Million
This fellow caught the WP download counter passing 3 million last night. Cool! That’s total downloads of the 2.6 series, we reset it every time we do a major X.X release.