Washington Is Killing Silicon Valley, an editorial from the Wall Street Journal. The main thing the article misses is that while the economics of startups are currently distorted doing a startup is still one of the best ways to change the world, for your work to have an impact far beyond the walls of a single company. I’ve seen some killer startups recently, my only hope is that they have enough runway to make it to the execution of their idea. Entrepreneurship.gov says “Freedom is just another word for entrepreneurship.” ¶

Friendster Relaunches Blogs, Switches to WordPress MU. Basically Friendster has switched millions of blogs from Typepad to WordPress, presumably at least partly because Six Apart abandoned their Typepad platform for third parties starting in late 2006 with Le Monde. ¶

WordPress “Art Direction” Plugin, from Automattician Noel Jackson. Basically allows you to do what Jason Santa Maria does for his blog without all the custom code and template hacking, just a simple plugin. ¶

A Journey Through Five Years of WordPress Interface. Take a look at what the WordPress interface looked like at the beginning of 2008. How far we’ve come! ¶

WordCamp San Francisco 2009 will be on May 30, 2009. ¶

Inside the world’s most annoying economic crisis, on a shortage of coins in Argentina. “Factoring in the 50 centavos he had already handed over, this effectively reduced the fare to 13.50 pesos, which, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment, is actually more than 14.50 pesos.” Hat tip: Paul Kedrosky. ¶

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. ¶

Hacking Knowledge: 77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better. ¶

Open Thread: Social Web & Its Challenges . “building floating gas stations for the flying cars” ¶

Three Reasons Open Source Will Save The Economy. Only three? I bet we could think of way more. ¶