Loud Typers

Personal

I’m in Robert Scoble’s session and there was a minor episode between Bob Wyman and Dave Winer and a few people left, but I think things have calmed down a bit. What’s really striking me right now is how loud it is even though no one is talking. The clatter of everyone typing makes it sound like it’s drizzling outside. Lawrence Lessig is a very loud typist.

Interview, and Complementing Slack

Interview, Tech

I had a conversation with Tony Conrad at the StrictlyVC event in San Francisco last week, following a dizzyingly talented line-up of Chamath Palihapitiya and Steve Jurvetson.

Techcrunch has a good write-up with a number of the relevant quotes from the event. The only thing I’d like to respond to, because it wasn’t a direct quote, is the headline “Move Over Slack? Automattic Mulls Commercializing Its Own Internal Messaging Product.”

The first problem is the headline missed the obvious alliteration of “Mullenweg Mulls,” 😀but more importantly… Slack has become a really key tool for both Automattic and WordPress.org and anything we do with the evolution of P2 (some of which we already have running internally) will be complementary to Slack, not competitive with it.

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scatted light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be disolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

From A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit.