Zach Holman writes on how chat is superior to meetings for most things that businesses do. From the description, Github sounds extremely similar to how Automattic operates. We’ve been going a slightly different direction though: after 7 years of essentially no meetings, many teams have started to incorporate more regular Google Hangouts in addition to their few-time-a-year in-person meetups. I’m curious to see how these evolve, right now my theory is these are largely to restore some of the social connectedness you lose when working remotely, with the pleasant side benefit of occasionally knocking out issues or decisions that high-bandwidth communication can facilitate better.
Aside Archives
In the past on WordPress.com there’s been a big gap between Pro, which costs around $100 a year, and VIP, which starts around $60,000 a year. Now it’s been partially filled, and we’re calling the new service WordPress.com Enterprise. You get 90% of the benefit of VIP — scalability, security, upgrades, 70+ audited plugins, full JavaScript access — for 10% of the cost, or about $500 a month. I think Enterprise is a perfect fit for many higher-end and business sites. Full speed ahead, number one.
Nassim Taleb, one of my favorite living authors, has written 44 five-star reviews on Amazon. It’s a great reading list.
WordPress.com now accepts payments via Bitcoin, possibly the largest internet service yet to adopt it. I find Bitcoin intrinsically interesting as a crypto-currency, but it also might open up our premium services to folks who couldn’t use them before. It’s been fun to watch the store engine of WP.com evolve behind the scenes. In other WordPress.com news, there are now verticals for municipalities and bands, and we compiled an incomplete list of best-selling authors on WordPress.
Rolling Jubilee is a non-profit that takes donations to buy distressed debt for pennies on the dollar, and then abolishes it. Donate $100 and they can take $2,000 off someone’s back. Seems like an amazing random act of kindness, you’ll never know who you helped.
It’s interesting to read the contrast between the presidential endorsements (for Obama) from two of my favorite magazines, the New Yorker and Economist. Mayor Bloomberg was also a surprise. The Wikipedia, as always, has very comprehensive lists of endorsements for Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.
I’m really excited abou the new Jetpack, it includes toolbar notifications, mobile push for iOS, a new REST API, and fixes to the contact form.
I’m putting together the State of the Word address for the upcoming WordCamp San Francicso, and one thing I like to do every year is highlight some cool WordPress-powered sites, especially ones that show off the power of the platform. I have a few in mind already, but are there any WP sites you’ve seen recently that really blew your mind? Leave links in the comments.
Mike Hendrickson, Roger Magoulas, and Tim O’Reilly have a new report on the Economic Impact of Open Source Software, which included one of their findings that “WordPress is a far more important open source product than most people give it credit for. In the SMB hosting market, it is as widely used as MySQL and PHP, far ahead of Joomla and Drupal, the other leading content management systems.”
An oldie but a goodie: Your New TV Ruins Movies. I’ve been known to do this to TVs of friends and family without telling them.
By selling tickets directly and putting restrictions on them Louis C.K. drops scalping by 96%. This guy is on the very edge, just like VHX is making video sales and distribution available to everyone someone will do the same with this ticketing platform. It’s impressive what a creative mind paired with just a bit of technology can do.
Interesting note: WordPress Comes To Chinese Users Via Sina.com’s New Cloud Service, costs CNY1 a month.
I’ve been going retina-happy. It’ll be tricky to do the main graphics of this site (might just be easier to do a new design) but if you visit any of the photos on ma.tt on a retina display you should get double-resolution images, it really shines on photos like this one from South Africa, this one from Napa Valley, or this one from Ethiopia.
One of the cornerstones of Automattic’s web-scale infrastructure is a project out of Russia we started using in 2008 called Nginx. Don’t let the sparse website fool you, Nginx (pronounced engine-ex) has been taking high-end websites by storm, and is used on 24% of the top thousand websites (a good chunk of them WordPress). I was very proud of our team helping sponsor and debug SPDY support in the latest release. Hopefully this accelerates the adoption of technology like SPDY that improves the user experience of the web.
I thought I could skip this one, but have been getting lots of ribbing on the NY Times Bachelorville article that was in their style section yesterday. To answer the FAQs: 1. My eyes are not always red. 2. Dvorak really is a thing. 3. I, too, had to look up what they meant by “unreconstructed.”
The Verge has a pretty epic feature on the history of Palm, Treo, and WebOS. Not many people know this but I started and ran the Houston Palm Users Group after getting a Handspring Visor in high school. PalmOS had apps, connectivity, handwriting input, infrared beaming…
Via an excellent article by Dan Phiffer I came across this NY Times article Wasting Time Is New Divide in Digital Era. Give both a read, it adds a new dimension to the culture of distraction.
The Breadpig guys fundraised a billboard to go up in Lamar Smith’s district in Texas saying “Don’t Mess With the Internet.” I’m a Texan and I approve this message.
The video from last night’s PandoMonthly interview isn’t up yet, but there have been five blog posts that came out of it on their site if you want some of the highlights: Facebook, You’ve Got a Friend: Matt Mullenweg Thinks You Own the Future of Advertising; Distributed Workforces are All About Results; Matt Mullenweg and the Cult of WordPress; I’m Worried That Silicon Valley Might Be Destroying the World; WordPress and Tumblr are Complementary, WordPress Founder Says.