Some good news today, TripIt is joining up with Concur. I’m excited about this because I travel all the time and I’m curious to see the TripIt approach and team working in the space with a larger team and more resources. 
∞
Filed under: Personal
Today is a fun day — 2011-1-11 (not 1:11 PM anymore, I’m a slow writer) and I’m turning 27. This is the time of the year I always look back, and from last year’s resolutions I actually did pretty well. I was able to simplify a number of areas of my life, including reducing the number of computers running in my place. I bought my first apartment and remodeled it. I slowed down my eating by chewing more, a vignette that made Tim’s new Four Hour Body book. Redesigned this site. I didn’t bike at all, but walked a ton. I started exercising with a kettlebell over the summer and was pretty consistent about it until last month, with some noticeable improvements in strength and energy. Got all the old photo galleries imported going all the way to 2002.
I petered out on Farscape, and didn’t display my photography anywhere in print, so a wash there. I spent a week in the woods with Beau at Tracker camp. I joined the board of the non-profit Grist, and was able to expand charitable donations to cover more organizations than previously, including Charity: Water, FSF, Apache, Archive.org, Samasource, EFF, and GAFFTA. I had a tweet go viral and end up on Time and CBS (I still need to blog about that), and a blog post about shipping go viral and get over a hundred thousand visitors. (With an interesting traffic pattern too — lots of Twitter and Facebook like you would expect, but 92% of the traffic from the long tail or blogs like Daring Fireball.)
Speaking of launches, was lucky to hit all the big ones I had planned in the beginning of the year in that abbreviation-coded list: VaultPress, new Akismet, mobile WordPress apps for every platform, Ma.tt themes, Audrey Capital, WordPress Foundation. Also hired 28 new Automatticians, added 7.2 million blogs to WP.com, and had 38 million downloads from WordPress.org.
This year, along lines of simplifying, I have six main goals:
It’s not a resolution, but I think I’m going to spend a lot more time in Houston in 2011. As for some other stats: 208 posts here on ma.tt (up Y/Y for first time since 2007), 535 posts on my moblog, 4,456 comments, and posted 2,432 photos. The top five posts were 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number, Wildcard DNS and Sub Domains, The Headers of Twenty Ten, Change OS X Computer Name, and Sonos vs Squeezebox, but most of the traffic was to the home page. My top emailers were Toni, Rose, Paul, my Mom, and Raanan with 3,028 emails between them. I sent 10,813 emails to about 2,228 people.
According to TripIt, which I love and use constantly, I was on the road 227 days out of the year, traveling 122,066 miles across 59 cities and 17 countries.
27 is a really awkward age — I’m not young anymore but still before the looming 30. It’s inbetween. That said, I think 2011 is going to be a year where a lot of things come together and a lot of the foundations laid down in 2010 (and when I was 26) come to fruition.
This is the ninth year I’ve blogged my birthday: 19, 20, 21, 22 (this one is funny), 23, 24, 25, and 26.
Rich Brooks on Fast Company asks What’s the Best Blog Platform?. That’s an easy one to answer. There’s still some disagreement over “What’s the best CMS?” but we’re trying to make that one easy to answer, too. ∞
Today has been a very exciting day. First off, About.me has been acquired by Aol, as good friend Tony Conrad writes about on his blog. A great deal on both sides, I think Aol got a steal and a great team here. Second, one of Audrey’s earliest investments Wakemate has finally shipped their first version, which I’ve been using the past two nights and has been great. (I’m averaging 60 so far.) Reserve your Wakemate here. ∞
40% of the tasks in Mechanical Turk are getting people to spam. Amazon should take a hard stance against these, as soon as possible. ∞
The first data set they analyzed was on the economic productivity of American cities, and it quickly became clear that their working hypothesis — like elephants, cities become more efficient as they get bigger — was profoundly incomplete. According to the data, whenever a city doubles in size, every measure of economic activity, from construction spending to the amount of bank deposits, increases by approximately 15 percent per capita.
A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation on NYTimes.com. A fascinating article about some constants between cities, and a bit at the end about how laws are different for corporations. ∞
I’ve been really enjoying the new features in Akismet:
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. ∞
But blogging perseveres–as it should. It is a place where context, thoughtfulness and continuity are rewarded with inbound links, ReTweets, bookmarks, comments and Likes. Blogs are the digital library of our intellect, experience, and vision.
Brian Solis on The State of the Blogosphere 2010. ∞
The talk Toni and I did with Alexia Tsotsis at LeWeb this year is now online, at the end we talk a bit about what’s next for Automattic in the WP world:
Also chatted with Hermione Way of The Next Web about the biggest tech story of the year.
Visited the Musée Rodin, Versailles which had the Takashi Murakami exhibit, and finally the Louvre.
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Drinks at Hotel Costes, a fantastic Le Web dinner at Guy Savoy’s restaurant including some peaks behind the scenes and a tour of the kitchen, and closing out the night with some cognac at George V. A lovely night.
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I went skiing for the first time in Deer Valley. Includes a video of the one time Barry fell, but not the 15 times I fell.
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The other day I was interviewed by Jeffrey Zeldman and Dan Benjamin for the Big Web Show, which you can now view here. Also good to watch if you’d like an update on my beard adventure.
Earlier tonight I won a TechFellow Award in the “Product Design and Marketing” category. I thought this would be a good opportunity to thank the two people who have had the biggest design influence over the past few years on WordPress (and me): Jane Wells and Matt “MT” Thomas. ∞
Mystery Surrounds Cyber Missile That Crippled Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Ambitions, such a cool story. ∞
Groupon has been in the news lately as a rumored 6 billion dollar acquisition target, and of course their blog is powered by WordPress. On that fact alone I’d say, go for it Google! ∞