That is the Automattic Lounge on the lower left of the Pier. The weather the week ahead for SF, crazy for January, or, for that matter, June. 
Scott is a co-founder of Salon, and this excerpt is from his essay on “Blogging, empowerment, and the ‘adjacent possible.’”
One way to assess the impact of blogging is to say that the number of people who have had the experience of writing in public has skyrocketed over the course of the last decade. Let’s say that, pre-Internet, the universe of people with experience writing in public — journalists, authors, scholars — was, perhaps, 100,000 people. And let’s say that, of the hundreds of millions of blogs reported to date, maybe 10 million of them are sustained enough efforts for us to say that their authors have gained real experience writing in public. I’m pulling these numbers out of a hat, trying to err on the conservative side. We still get an expansion of a hundredfold.
Each of these people now has an entirely new set of ‘adjacent possibilities’ to explore. What they make of those opportunities will shape the next couple of decades in important, and still unpredictable, ways.
Dan, in the middle, recruited me into Mozilla back in 2005. He’s now instigating a ruckus at Rypple.
Automattic’s amazing Data team launched a new stats project over the weekend. It’s an “Annual Report” that was emailed out to WordPress.com bloggers and contained the stats you see below, along with a helpful link to publish them out to your blog. I especially love that Martin, Joen, and Andy took the time to humanize the bigger numbers, so they become more comprehensible. Great start to 2011 for WordPress.com.
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.
A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 10,000 times in 2010. That’s about 24 full 747s.
In 2010, there were 69 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 204 posts. There were 87 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 21mb. That’s about 2 pictures per week.
The busiest day of the year was January 5th with 276 views. The most popular post that day was Happy New Year.
The top referring sites in 2010 were automattic.com, Google Reader, ma.tt, twitter.com, and people.mozilla.org.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for google, pkb, paul kim, using bugzilla, and baron davis dunk.
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
Happy New Year December 2009
16 comments
Firefox Start Page Update November 2007
10 comments
A Good Day April 2006
15 comments
a non-developer’s guide to using bugzilla March 2007
8 comments
Bio February 2006
Some of your most popular posts were written before 2010. Your writing has staying power! Consider writing about those topics again.
At the GAFFTA Binary New Year’s Eve celebration.
If you’re a blogger and you’re looking for something difficult but rewarding to take on in 2011, check out Scott Berkun’s Daily Post challenge over at WordPress.com.
The Post Every Day challenge
Daily habits are the best way to make change happen. If you can remember to do something every day, by the end of the year, you’ll have done that thing over 300 times! Simple and amazing.
As part of the DailyPost, we’re launching two campaigns:
* Post a Day 2011: Post something to your blog every single day through 2011
* Post a Week 2011: Post to your blog at least once a week through 2011If you’re thinking big, sign up for PostADay. If you’re haven’t posted in ages, or have never posted at all, PostAWeek might be your speed. Still noble and bold, but perhaps more your style.
And of course, feel free to set your own goal – sign up as if you were doing PostAWeek, just so we can keep tabs on what you’re up to.
Much longer than usual quote from the source, but this is dynamic reporting by Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic on the velocity of one essay and the people who accelerated it forward, c. 2010.
Bady’s kept the Zunguzungu blog since March of 2007 when he traveled to Tanzania. He’s averaged 15 or 20 posts a month since, mostly just links and blockquoted excerpts. In May of 2010, he had a big day when he posted about “The Soul of Mark Zuckerberg,” deconstructing one Zuckerberg quote with the help of W.E.B. DuBois. That post ended up linked by Jillian York, who works at Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. Bady thinks it’s that post that brought his blog to the attention of several in that sphere, including Cambridge resident and ethnomusicologist Wayne Marshall, who just so happens to be giving a talk at Berkman tomorrow. Marshall, in turn, appears to have been the key link between Bady and the world at large. He retweeted Bady’s announcement of his post on November 29. (UPDATE, 8:04 pm: Marshall pointed out to me on Twitter he’s known about Bady since December of 2008, and he’s got a blog post to prove it.)
The next day, the Berkman Center’s Ethan Zuckerman tweeted the post, calling it a useful close reading of Assange’s 2006 essay (which it is). Zuckerman is one of the most respected thinkers and writers on the geopolitical implications of technology and his tweet went far. It was retweeted by 30 people — and more importantly brought the post to the attention of BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin, which sent traffic pouring to the post. The same day, WikiLeaks Twitter feed also linked to the post, saying “Good essay on one of the key ideas behind WikiLeaks.” 90 more people retweeted the post. According to BackType, almost 2,500 people have tweeted the story.
By 12:45 p.m. on the 30th, the post had made Nieman Journalism Lab’s Popular on Twitter list for the day. By 6:39 p.m., the New York Times’ Lede breaking-news blog had linked to Bady’s post. According to traffic logs Bady shared with me, almost 50,000 people visited the post that day, including — no doubt — many of the most influential journalists and opinion leaders. Tens of thousands have visited in the days since. Bady regularly engages in Twitter conversations now with the academics and journalists covering the story. Volunteers translated his story into Spanish, Dutch, and German.
- Alexis Madrigal, “The Unknown Blogger Who Changed WikiLeaks Coverage”
– Our 2010 holiday card, by Gary Fernandez
Hi, I'm Paul Kim. I work for Automattic. We make WordPress.com, and much more. Many of us also contribute to the WordPress.org open source project. This is my personal blog.
