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I’ve been dubbed The Publisher by BusinessWeek as one of their “25 Most Influential People on the Web.” Before anyone else writes in that I beat Rupert Murdoch, I think the slideshow is in alphabetical order. 
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The Startonomics conference is happening this Thursday in San Francisco and looks pretty interesting, I’m going to try to go by.
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Om’s Birthday Dinner
A True dinner for Om‘s birthday and guest of honor Kara Swisher.
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The Scotts and Salt Lake
A Sunday morning with the Scott family and a brief tour of downtown Salt Lake City.
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Alex King is on stage at WordCamp Utah and just announced and launched the Carrington theme. It allows really advanced conditional template displays based on any number of variables and executed by naming conventions and its structure. I think this could be the base for a whole new generation of themes and development.
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Mark Cuban, Jason Calacanis, Hackaday, and the Royal Navy all now have WordPress-powered blogs. The first three switched from Blogsmith. Hat tip: Automattic Publisher Blog.
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Revisiting Moral Hazard, by Bob McTeer. (Whom I’ve met.)
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There’s not one but three four WordCamps this weekend. I just got back from China, where both the Beijing and Shanghai events were great. (More pictures coming soon.) This Saturday you can check out WordPress events in Portland, Salt Lake City (I’ll be attending this one, they asked me first), Vancouver, and Birmingham.
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Inc. just announced their Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30 and I came in at #18. Cool! Some really young ones on the list though — I’m getting old.
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First day in Beijing
Flying to Beijing, dinner, walking around Tienanmen Square.
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I’m going to be in China later this week for WordCamp Shanghai and Beijing. Really looking forward to meeting all the WordPress users there.
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Dropbox is open to the public now. I’d love something like this I could use with my own Subversion server.
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Yahoo’s Hack Day is coming up this Friday and Saturday. I’m going to be a judge at the event. The other judges are David Filo, Ash Patel, Cheryl Ainoa, Jeff Clavier, Rashmi Sinha, and Om Malik. Fun group!
Intense Debate Goes Automattic
Filed under: Automattic
Tags: WordPress, comments, intense debate, wordpress.com
Some cool news today — Automattic is acquiring Intense Debate. You can read more on Jon’s blog on Intense Debate, or on Toni’s blog, or on VC Mike’s blog.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the product, Intense Debate supercharges the comment section of WordPress blogs and other sites with cool features like threading, reply by email, voting, reputation, and global profiles. There are a few companies tackling this space right now, but I was impressed with how much ID (Intense Debate) has been able to do with a small team, and happy to find that their common platform (PHP and MySQL) would make integration a lot easier.
Going forward, the plan is to keep Intense Debate available as a platform-agnostic independent service, much like Akismet. We’ll start to integrate its features into WordPress core, WordPress.com, and Gravatar as appropriate. For example, comment threading is going to be in WordPress 2.7, but reply by email is a lot easier to implement on a hosted service like WordPress.com. We’re also going to be able to lend our expertise in scaling to the ID team to make sure their users enjoy the same hassle-free speed and bulletproof availability as users of other Automattic services.
Long-term, I think that comments are the most crucial interaction point for blogs, and an area that deserves a lot of investment and innovation. Comments really haven’t changed in a decade, and it’s time to spice things up a little.
We were early in the space with investing in Akismet to solve the spam problem, but now I think the real growth opportunities are in the user interaction and social features across comments. There is a huge opportunity to increase the traffic and engagement of blogs significantly. WordPress.com alone already gets about three legitimate comments every second — more than a quarter of a million every day. I’m excited to see what the Intense Debate team can do to make things more interesting.