Support Job
Automattic has a new position we’re hiring for.
Vote for CMS Award
Vote for WordPress in the Best Open Source Social Networking CMS Award. No, I have no idea what that category means either.
WordCamp Videos
Most of the session pages on the 2007 WordCamp site now have videos on them, taken by John Pozadzides.
The Shifted Librarian
Bug Fixers
Self Importance Test
Technosailor has an online self-importance test that tells you which “web celebrity” you are based on a few questions. I’m apparently a possible outcome but when I took the test myself I got “Jason Calacanis.”
Pownce XFN
Nerd Attention Damage
I would like to award the prize for the Most Damage Inflicted to the Geek/Nerd World in the Past 5 Years to Michael Lopp, author of the seminal Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder in 2003. No article more effectively romanticized an inability to do one thing at a time, and do it well. On the bright side, Digg and Bloglines should probably give him stock. Need an antidote? Spend 10 minutes collecting everything you need to work on a problem, and unplug the internet for 2 hours. You’ll finish in 30 minutes.
Confession
I’ve been using IE7 quite a bit lately. It’s a darn-good browser and seems very fast, especially when I have a lot of tabs open, compared to Firefox.
On Labor Day
Should poetry be open-source?
SUNW to JAVA
Now that Sun has changed their stock ticker from SUNW to JAVA, here’s ten other companies that should change their tickers. By the way, Om was just named one of the 50 most influential Indian Americans.
Digg Effect Deconstruction
The Digg Effect: A Deconstruction, with a WordPress blog of course.
WordPress Malaysia Logo
Malaysia is celebrating 50 years of Merdeka and Avijit made these cool WordPress logos to celebrate.
Browser Stats
I’m at An Event Apart in Chicago and Eric Meyer just said that browser statistics were “worse than useless.” More specifically, the only browser share numbers that matter are the one for sites you run, not what the web at large uses. Here’s our browser breakdown from 115 million visits to WordPress.com:
- 62.46% – Internet Explorer, sub-breakdown by popular request
- 64.10% – Version 6.0
- 35.17% – Version 7.0
- 0.28% – Version 5.5
- 30.74% – Firefox
- 3.83% – Safari
- 1.78% – Opera
- 0.52% – Mozilla
Just for fun, the operating system breakdown:
- 90.36% – Windows
- 6.73% – Macintosh
- 2.19% – Linux
- 0.03% – PlayStation Portable
Vanilla News!
Good news! The links in Vanilla that brought the rats out defending them have now been removed by Mark at Lussomo. I applaud this decision to break the text link contract they were in and to put my money where my mouth is I just donated a thousand dollars from my personal account to the project.
Redirect Plugin
Grey Followup
On the bright side, last week’s hatchet job in Techcrunch generated some great blog posts. For whatever reason they don’t show up as links on Techcrunch’s page, but here’s some of the better ones:
- Duncan Riley Supports Adversarial Value Extracting Strategies in Open Source Software from Adam of idly.org.
- The Grey Area is from Mark Jaquith, a core contributor to WordPress, makes part of the case for why Akismet is a good anti-spam plugin to bundle with WordPress.
- Techcrunch questions Matt Mullenweg’s Ethics from Amy Stephen at Open Source Community
- Making Money from Open Source talks about white, grey, and black ways of making money from OS.
- Finally Open Source: Grey and Green from Andrew has a literary objection.
To summarize some of my responses:
- I have no problem with people making money from Open Source, in fact I think some of the most successful OS projects have profit motives aligned with user motives.
- Related: I have no problem with Pligg being sold. I think it’s better than them selling links in the software.
- It is possible to make money while giving your users something they want and provides value rather than something they never asked for. (Think of selling a hosted version vs. selling paid links meant to spam search engines.)
- The fact that I made a similar mistake in the past gives me unique perspective into both sides of the issue.
- The developer blogroll links in WordPress are nothing like the links being bought and sold for the intention of spamming search engines, but regardless they have been replaced with links to WordPress resources instead of individual contributors.
- Duncan said “Money is money, no matter how you make it.” I could not disagree more.
- While anyone can do almost anything with WordPress under its license, that doesn’t mean we have an obligation to promote folks who we feel are doing so in a way which is not ethical or in the best long-term interests of the community.