Feeling Lucky? by Tara Hunt: “It turns out that there IS such thing as lucky people, but it’s not some sort of mystical fate playing its hand at work after all. Instead, ‘lucky people’ are those who are really observant and open to opportunities.”

Nov
28
Filed under: WordPress | November 28th, 2009

Micro-blogging vs Mega-blogging

I don’t think “mega-blogging” is actually a thing, I just made it up to make the title sound more dramatic. But if mega-blogging were a thing, you would do it with WordPress. Micro-blogging is a thing, ash a lot of people do it with Twitter.

TechCrunch drops in this fray with an article comparing the comScore numbers of WordPress.com and Twitter.com, which show an accelerating growth for WP.com and flattening for Twitter. I’ll talk about the data itself later, but first wanted to point out a point many overlook when trying to create a battle between the mediums.

New forms of social media, including micro-blogging, are complementary to blogging.

One of the many uses of Twitter is to link to and promote your blog posts. (And other people’s blog posts.) As we grow, so do they, and vice versa. I blog when I have something longer to say, like this. I tweet when it’s the lowest friction way to talk to my friends, or get distribution for something longer I did somewhere else.

It’s not really a “versus,” it’s an “and.”

Whether the Twitter team intended it or not, they’ve built a killer and highly addictive reader platform with dozens of interesting UIs on top of it.

Features like WP.me, post by email, Twitter publicize, RSS Cloud, P2, email subscriptions, and more stuff in the cooker is trying to tie these things together more because people who do one are highly likely to do another.

As for the accuracy of underlying comScore data I would say they probably are precise but not accurate, meaning that whatever flaws they have in collection now, for example for WP.com they don’t count the custom domains or RSS readers and for Twitter they don’t count API usage or desktop clients, they’re at least self-consistent in how they do things over time. Some months they show us flat our internal stats showed growth, and vice versa. Ultimately it’s not worth anyone outside of comScore arguing how they collect their data, it’s better just to use it as one reference point alongside Quantcast (my fav), Alexa, Google Trends, Nielsen…

How tweets get imported into a blog is still an open question for me. I’ve seen lots of ways people have attempted it but when a blog becomes an activity stream it becomes a weak version of all the things it aggregates, less than the sum of its parts, because of the loss of context.

Nov
19
Filed under: press | November 19th, 2009

This Week in Startups

Last week I was on This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis and Joel Spolsky. Here’s the show:

Nov
11
Filed under: Meta | November 11th, 2009

Published on CNN

Today a short piece “10 blogs to make you think” I wrote for CNN.com was published. I’m pretty excited about this and I also hope it drives a new audience to the blogs I mentioned, though to be fair if you’re not fascinated by how technology is changing society my picks might not be interesting. It’s a short piece in a “top ten” format, but I put a lot of thought into curating the picks.

I started blogging because I love writing. While the nature of Automattic is such that I’m writing all day long to communicate with my colleagues but writing for communication is different from the state of mind you’re in when you sit down to tell a story or change someone’s perspective. (Though perhaps it shouldn’t be.)

I started blogging for writing, I kept blogging for comments. It turns out what I love isn’t the act of writing itself, which has never come easy to me, but the conversation that happens afterward. Collectively in tech we become infatuated with each new medium be it blogs, widgets, social networks, micro-blogs, but in the end it always comes back to people talking to each other and eventually the novelty of the format fades.

As a final note when I write now I go into the WordPress editor because I know the auto-save will make sure my text is always safe, it produces clean and simple HTML, and I lean on After the Deadline. (Which now helps you rock the diaeresis New Yorker-style.)

Nov
11
Filed under: Review | November 11th, 2009

First Impressions of Sony X

I’m a little addicted to gadgets, especially Sony laptops which have served as my primary on-the-go machines for the past few years because of their power and portability. When I first saw the Vaio X, Sony’s new ultra-thin and ultra-light laptop, I was taken aback. It looked beautiful, but so was the Envy 133 and the Envy was a complete waste of time and money due to a really bad trackpad and performance. Anyway, I’ve been playing with the X1 for 5-6 hours now, and here are some unordered thoughts:

  1. It is the sexiest and most elegant laptop I’ve held or seen. Feels like it’s from the future.
  2. It feels almost too light, I actually threw it up and caught it, particularly with the normal-sized battery.
  3. I got the champagne color, which was a good choice.
  4. The ethernet port works in a really interesting way.
  5. Speed of browsing, installing, everything feels pretty good with Windows 7, but it’s obvious the graphics card is pretty underpowered. The moment you turn transparency on or get a flash video on Blip going it starts to stutter a bit.
  6. That said, I could imagine using this as my primary machine for short and medium trips.
  7. The keyboard takes a bit of getting used to in a way I haven’t run into before: the space bar is hard to hit. The keyboard is very compressed in vertical space so your thumb falls below where the space bar is, and you have to retrain your hand to be in a different position which isn’t as comfortable. The shift button can be hard to hit but that’s much easier to get used to, I’ve done it on other small keyboards. I’m not sure why they made it so small, it feels like it could stretch out a bit more.
  8. Other big annoyance is the trackpad — it’s really narrow. Windows machines do the trackpad scroll on the right and bottom edges of the pad and I find myself triggering that accidentally because the tracking area is so tiny. Again, lots of apparent space toward the bottom of the laptop just a really narrow tracking area. This is easier to get used to than the keyboard, though, and the trackpad feels nice like most Vaios and unlike the Voodoo Envy.
  9. I love that it has two USB ports, and a regular VGA connector instead of some weird micro-display-port you need a dongle for. (An Apple decision that bugs me almost as much as the recessed headphone connector on the original iPhone.)
  10. Screen is gorgeous, like all recent Vaios.
  11. Did I mention it’s drop-dead gorgeous? It’s the first laptop I’ve had in 5 years that I don’t want to put stickers on.
  12. Hardware-wise, way better than the Air.

So while it won’t be replacing my Z890 as primary workhorse for now, the X is so light I might take it on my next few trips and use it as a day-top. I’m especially excited by the prospect of the 14 hour battery life (probably 10 in real life use) giving me freedom from power cords through even a whole day at a WordCamp. We’ll see in a week or two if I’m able to comfortably adjust to the too-small keyboard and trackpad.

CoPress Pushes Innovation, Shows Value of Open-Source Platforms.

After the Deadline, the intelligent spell- and grammar-checking service Automattic acquired a few months ago, is releasing its core technology under the GPL. There’s also a new jQuery API that makes it easy to integrate with any textarea. Ostatic writes about it here.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain this to you, a story about someone republishing Mark Pilgrim’s book and selling it on Amazon. Not directly about the GPL, but the principles are the same.

Curious if you guys have any favorite keyboard covers, I vaguely recall reading about one on Alex King’s site but can’t find it now. I’m looking for one to put over my laptop keys when I close the cover to avoid damaging the screen.

Top 10 Most Common Coding Mistakes in WordPress Plugins.

My friend Liz Welch recently finished up her new book with her siblings, The Kids are All Right. “Well, 1983 certainly wasn’t boring for the Welch family. Somehow, between their handsome father’s mysterious death, their glamorous soap opera star mother’s cancer diagnosis, and a phalanx of lawyers intent on bankruptcy proceedings, the four Welch siblings managed to handle each new heartbreaking misfortune together. But all that changed with the death of their mother. While nineteen year-old Amanda was legally on her own, the three younger siblings—Liz, 16; Dan, 14 and Diana, 8—were each dispersed to a different set of family friends.” I just ordered it on my Kindle.

Oct
9
Filed under: Ask Matt | Tags: , , , | October 9th, 2009

Q&A: WordPress & GPL

In this one we cover the GPL and how it benefits WordPress, why WP is under the GPL, commercial themes, how the GPL fosters innovation, creates value, and affects themes and plugins.

This one covers how open source creates ownership, the importance of community to WordPress, the role of BuddyPress in social media, open source and government, and the infectious nature of the open source mindset. Hope you guys enjoy!

Oct
1
Filed under: Quote | October 1st, 2009

Irrational Finance

Two excerpts from Rational Irrationality: The real reason that capitalism is so crash-prone.

What boosts a firm’s stock price, and the boss’s standing, is a rapid expansion in revenues and market share. Privately, he may harbor reservations about a particular business line, such as subprime securitization. But, once his peers have entered the field, and are making money, his firm has little choice except to join them. C.E.O.s certainly don’t have much personal incentive to exercise caution. Most of them receive compensation packages loaded with stock options, which reward them for delivering extraordinary growth rather than maintaining product quality and protecting their firm’s reputation.

Here is another on financial innovation, which made me think of my bank post:

Limiting the development of those securities would stifle innovation, the financial industry contends. But that’s precisely the point. “The goal is not to have the most advanced financial system, but a financial system that is reasonably advanced but robust,” Viral V. Acharya and Matthew Richardson, two economists at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, wrote in a recent paper. “That’s no different from what we seek in other areas of human activity. We don’t use the most advanced aircraft to move millions of people around the world. We use reasonably advanced aircrafts whose designs have proved to be reliable.”

Oct
1
Filed under: Ask Matt | October 1st, 2009

Q&A: WordPress Now

A Q&A about the future of WordPress. Filmed by Michael Pick, video by VideoPress.

Revealed: The ghost fleet of the recession anchored just east of Singapore | Mail Online.  Hat tip: Eric Case.

Sep
29
Filed under: Ask Matt | Tags: | September 29th, 2009

Ask Matt: Which Email Client?

Video using VideoPress and filmed/edited by Michael Pick.

Going to set up a new form for these.

I’ll be chatting with Liz Danzico at the School of Visual Arts in New York, New York when I’m there in November. I’ll be speaking in NYC three times that week: WordCamp New York, SVA, and at Web 2.0 Expo. Would love to see my Yankee peeps while out there. :)