Jun
20
0

Gopher dead, blogging lives. “If blogs are dead, what are we reading in Instapaper?”   ∞

9

I was in Washington DC last week at the OpenGovDC conference where I participated on a panel about design. The organizers and many of the speakers were pretty Drupal-focused, but I did get to meet some folks and learn about the ever-growing use of WordPress inside the Beltway. Here are four:

  1. CFPB, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This is the best-looking of the four, and 100% WordPress.
  2. MO.gov, Missouri State. Is there a LESS.gov? ;) The show-me state has a solid WP-as-CMS going here.
  3. Office of Compliance. As exciting as it sounds.
  4. NCCS.gov, National Center for Computational Sciences. Website is okay, but center is super-cool: they provide super-computing (tens of thousands of processors) for open scientific research.

Any other favorites? Particularly well-designed ones like consumerfinance.gov.   ∞

Jun
3
13

Six years ago on this blog we scheduled a WordPress meetup in Seattle which ended up including a number of folks who are still changing the web today, including Bre Pettis, Robert Scoble, Chris Pirillo, Matt May, Filipe Fortes, Andy Skelton, Scott Berkun, and Lee Lefever. We’re going to do an informal 2.0 tonight at 6 PM, Friday June 3 at Pike Pub & Brewery on 1st Avenue in downtown Seattle. Come by and share a beer, reminiscence about trackbacks, and talk about the future of the open web. It’s short notice, so please spread the word to your Seattle-area friends.   ∞

May
30
6

Louis Pasteur is credited with the observation that chance can only help the well-prepared mind. I also think that my long string of lucky breaks can be credited to my mode of paying attention: I look at funny things and never hesitate to ask questions. Most people would not have noticed the dirty blackboard, or looked at the article that my uncle gave me because he was not interested.

via Edge: THE FATHER OF LONG TAILS — Interview with Benoît Mandelbrot by Hans Ulrich Obrist. For extra credit and an exercise in brevity and clarity, link or write in the comments the simplest definition of “fractal” as used by Mandelbrot and Obrist in the interview.   ∞

May
29
27

I may be overstating the case, a little bit. Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.

Johnathan Franzen’s Liking is for Cowards in the NY Times.   ∞

May
25
14

The Internet measures everything. And I am a slave to those measurements. After so many years of pushing much of my life through this screen, I’ve started measuring my experiences and my sense of self-worth using the same metrics as the Internet uses to measure success. I check my stats relentlessly. The sad truth is that I spend more time measuring than I spend doing.

Fantastic read over at Tweetage Wasteland : I Don’t Care if You Read This Article. Or put another way “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Hat tip: Mark Riley.   ∞

May
24
7

I believe the mini-bubbles above are different ripples in what might call the surface of a superbubble: an opulence bubble. Here’s what I mean by opulence bubble: our conception of the good life, as I’ve discussed with you, has been centered on what I call hedonic opulence — having more, bigger, faster, cheaper, now. But we might be finding out, the hard way, that the pursuit of lowest-common-denominator industrial age stuff might have been steeply overvalued, in terms of its social, human, and financial value.

The Opulence Bubble by Umair Haque. Hat tip: Tim Bray and Paul Kedrosky.   ∞

May
17
3

Batters Up: Major League Baseball Now on WordPress.com. MLB’s blogging system used to be powered by Movable Type, and about 15,000 blogs switched over to WordPress.com as part of this. It’s an honor and delight to have so many great bloggers joining the family. They’re also in good company with VIP blogs for the NFL, NBA, NBC Sports…   ∞

May
12
0

Nassim Taleb on Living with Black Swans — “During a recent visit to Wharton as part of The Goldstone Forum, he spoke with Wharton finance professor Richard Herring — who taught Taleb when he was a Wharton MBA student — about events in the Middle East, the oil supply, investing in options, the U.S. economy, the dollar, health care and of course, black swans.”   ∞

Apr
15
15

I think there’s a difference between having a bestselling book–meaning through marketing, PR and buying that first wave of customers–and writing a bestselling book. The second implies that the product propels itself to the best seller list. That’s not to say that I’m Tolstoy or the best writer, but I used Facebook and Twitter more for feed back as I was creating and refining the book than for the actual marketing itself. My main online tool for priming the pump for the launch of the book was the blog. That was the heartbeat and the nexus for all the different tools that I use.

Via Tim Ferriss On Facebook, Twitter And Building A Huge Web Brand – Steven Bertoni – Money Talks – Forbes. I also liked this quote:

SB: How can a magazine catch up to the Web?

TF: If I worked for a magazine that’s very behind the times, I wouldn’t reinvent the wheel. I’d use WordPress as a content management system which has very good SEO out of the box. Companies spend so much time trying to develop something proprietary it’s ridiculous–you have thousands of people already working on WordPress.

   ∞