May
29
7

I actually dig the Facebook platform, but this quote is hilarious:
“And looking over press coverage of the announcement today, you’d think it was the late ’90s and Six Degrees had made Flooz its official currency and offered free Kozmo.com deliveries to all its members.”

May
21
8

As some of you may remember, I’ve been using a 32gb solid state drive in my desktop for a bit not, and I’ve been happy with it. Enough so that I was ready to make the jump to take apart my laptop and retrofit it with a SSD, and Toni was brave enough to volunteer as well. One problem — they’ve disappeared. All of the stores that I could previously find it from don’t have them anymore. Where did all the SSDs go? BTW the best news source I’ve found for SSDs is Engadget’s tag page.

May
19
4

Full Code Press is a 24-hour contest to build a website for a non-profit. Pretty cool idea.

May
18
0

Some Community Tips for 2007 from Mr Haughey.

3

The party Monday is on Upcoming, and also got some coverage at Laughing Squid with a bit of historical perspective. Also next week on Thursday is the NewTeeVee Pier Screening, which looks like it’s going to be a fun event.

1

Typepad now has Pages. “If you’re a TypePad blogger, we know you’re serious about making a great blog. But what about the parts of your site that don’t fit into your blog? [...] And you can even set a Page to be the home page for your blog, so it’s the first thing readers see when they go to your URL.”

May
16
21

On Monday May 21 we’re having a WordPress party at Thee Parkside in San Francisco. It’s a cool dive-type bar across the street from a park at 17th and Wisconsin, and they have a free ping pong table. (You may want to bring your own paddle though.) The party will get started around 8 PM and go until they kick us out. What’s the occasion? Well, WordPress 2.2 is out, WordPress.com is about to pass a million blogs, and we’re coming up on our 4th birthday since WP’s first release.

6

Truemors, the new rumor site from Guy Kawasaki, is built on WordPress. It joins 71miles as a cool app built on the WP framework.

4

I had the pleasure of chatting with Rafe at CNET the other day, and both parts of the video interview are now online. Part one covers monetization, lolcats, Microsoft, and Twitter; part two talks about version 2.2, stats, Akismet, and Web 2.0.

1

WordPress 2.2: Three Things Developers Will Like. Also check out Aaron’s 10 things you should know about 2.2.

May
15
29

WordPress 2.2 “Getz” is now available. Go get it! It’s totally worth upgrading. Here is Stan Getz and Dizzy Gillespie playing It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got That Swing to listen to while upgrading, you’ll be done before the song is.

39

It is pretty annoying tha the “tag” system in Thunderbird bears no relation to any tagging system implemented within the past four years. It is, at best, a non-folder-based categorization system, and doesn’t even have a particularly good UI for that. Thunderbird 2 also took away the views dropdown, which was an eminently useful feature, and the only way I can find to replicate it is to create search folders, which are of course are a lot clunkier. Might be time for a downgrade. Update: You can add back the views dropdown from the customize menu. Sweet! PhotoMatt.net readers rock. :)

May
10
121

Meaningful Overnight Relationship

Filed under: press

One thing I’ve noticed about talking to certain types of press, particularly mainstream, is that they have a pattern in mind before they write about something, and the better you conform to the pattern the more coverage you get.

I think what they really want is an unusually young founder, possibly with a partner, who stumbled on an idea in an epiphany moment, implemented it in days, and then enjoyed overnight success, preferably capped with some sort of financial hook such as a huge VC funding or selling out to a large company for millions of dollars.

It’s not uncommon to get leading questions trying to hit a point in the above patterns… Yes, WordPress really is four years old. I was 19. No, I didn’t create it alone, if I did you would have never heard of it. Actually, it entered a rather crowded field, not even close to being first. No, not planning to sell it, there isn’t really anything to sell, it’s more of a movement. No, I didn’t make 60 million dollars in 18 months.

What’s worst is I think these stories sell a false promise and hope to people outside of the industry — it attracts the wrong type of entrepreneurs — and inside of the industry it distracts us from what really matters.

Someday I think there will be a realization that the real story is more exciting than the cookie-cutter founder myth the media tries frame everything in. It’s not just one or two guys hacking on something alone, it’s dozens of people from across the world coming together because of a  shared passion. It’s not about selling out to a single company, it’s dozens of companies independently adopting and backing an open source platform for no reason other than its quality. I’m not a millionaire, and may never be, but there are now hundreds of people making their living using WordPress, and I expect that number to grow to tens of thousands. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning, not the prospect of becoming a feature on an internet behemoth’s checklist.

Finally it’s not Web 2.0, or another bandwagon me-too content management system with AJAX, it’s a mature project that has been around and grown up over four years of hard work, and it has many, many more years of hard work ahead of it. I smile these days when I see WordPress referred to as an “overnight success,” if only they knew how long an overnight success takes.

Update, see also:

May
9
7

At the end of the month I’m going to Greece for the Greek Blogger Camp on Ios Island. It looks like it is going to be fun, and the registration is very reasonable (30 euros) so I hope to see some of you there.