I was fortunate enough to be put on Vanity Fair’s Next Establishment list with a variety of cool people.
Aside Archives
At least 40% of TIME.com traffic is going through WordPress, probably more when you add up the non-vertical sites. Bummer they never mention WordPress in the original article.
I’m somewhere in the middle of the Arctic Sea right now, approximately 78°05’N, 28°45’E, but even through the thin pipe of an intermittent satellite connection the ripples were felt of the announcement that Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple. Jobs, or the idea of him, has had a profound impact on innumerable founders and CEOs. My own tribute to him (and Apple as an organization) is in the essay 1.0 is the Loneliest Number, where reviews of the original iPod punctuate a story of the messy act of creation. Moments like this give us an opportunity to take a step back and contemplate the bigger picture, so take a moment to read the post and think about what you’re launching next.
The past two days I’ve been at WordCamp San Francisco and the presentations have been amazing. For the first time ever for San Francisco we’ve had a really fantastic live video stream going from both rooms. It’s a pretty economical way to get all of the content of the conference without the cost of coming to San Francisco. We even had someone streaming from Pakistan! My talk on the State of the Word, will be tomorrow at 11 AM PST so get a ticket on the WordCamp SF site.
WordPress Japan has decided their official character nameAs you may have seen, the WordPress community released version 3.2 “Gershwin” yesterday. Here’s the announcement video with some of the new features:
When you get a chance also check out MT’s post about the Design of 3.2.
Here’s an update on WordPress woes in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. As far as I know we’ve had no contact with KazakhTelecom. Typically this happens when they don’t like something a blog is saying, so they block or degrade service for everybody. The footer of the site links to Global Voices Anonymous Blogging with WordPress and Tor guide, which is still excellent all these years later.
ExpanDrive, a program I’ve used for years, allows you to mount FTP, SFTP, or S3 accounts as local drives on your computer on Mac or Windows. They just released their new Windows version, and it’s fast and slick. They support key authentication, which is my must-have feature.
Alec Baldwin, my favorite character on 30 Rock, has a great-looking WordPress-powered site. It was also built by Alley Interactive who did the Observer site I blogged about the other day.
Six years ago on this blog we scheduled a WordPress meetup in Seattle which ended up including a number of folks who are still changing the web today, including Bre Pettis, Robert Scoble, Chris Pirillo, Matt May, Filipe Fortes, Andy Skelton, Scott Berkun, and Lee Lefever. We’re going to do an informal 2.0 tonight at 6 PM, Friday June 3 at Pike Pub & Brewery on 1st Avenue in downtown Seattle. Come by and share a beer, reminiscence about trackbacks, and talk about the future of the open web. It’s short notice, so please spread the word to your Seattle-area friends.
I’m honored to be have been chosen alongside some cool folks like Kevin Rose, Dave Morin, Andrew Mason, and Charlie Cheever as one of Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs in 2011. I only have 3 more years before I’m too old for these lists. 🙂
Batters Up: Major League Baseball Now on WordPress.com. MLB’s blogging system used to be powered by Movable Type, and about 15,000 blogs switched over to WordPress.com as part of this. It’s an honor and delight to have so many great bloggers joining the family. They’re also in good company with VIP blogs for the NFL, NBA, NBC Sports…
Remember my resolution to “Launch secret new thing, code abbreviation JP”? There was even a WP Candy thread guessing what it was. Well it’s live, and you can click here to read all about Jetpack. Check it out, every WordPress deserves a Jetpack. 🙂
On Friday at 3:30 I’m going to be interviewed onstage at SxSW by the formidable John Battelle on the Future of WordPress — you can see details here. Would love to see some of you there.
Last year Audrey made an investment in Enterproid, which just came out of stealth. Basically it’s a mod of Android that creates a virtualized environment so you can separate your work stuff and personal stuff, and be able to do fun stuff on your phone that everyone expects but not many IT departments allow. They’ve gotten good coverage on TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb, and just won several hundred thousand dollars from the QPrize and presented at the DEMO conference.
A few super-hip folks (Automattic, Wall Street Journal, and HostGator) are hosting a WordPress party with open bar and all-you-can-eat BBQ on Friday night at SxSW (deets here) but it’s invite only and there’ll be a list at the door. (We can only feed so many people!) However I have 15 spaces to give away to Ma.tt readers, which will go to the first 15 people to comment with a link to an image of the WP logo in a cool place (Photoshop allowed) and your WP-powered blog.
I was on the Steppin’ Off the Edge podcast the other day and mentioned I don’t have a Wikiquotes page. Well, now I do. If I’ve ever said something you enjoyed or inspired you, drop it on that page.
The always-excellent Big Picture blog sums up 2010 in photos, definitely take a few minutes this Friday and check out part one, part two, and part three.
Almost-beta WordPress 3.1 is now running for 15 million blogs on WP.com, the feedback has been really good already and hopefully we’ll iron out some of the few remaining bugs before we do the beta release. The link gives a nice overview of some of the user-facing features of 3.1.