Reader’s Digest helps you with your New Year’s resolutions, which we’re tracking on WordPress.com. Hat tip: Jeremy Boyd.
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Reader’s Digest helps you with your New Year’s resolutions, which we’re tracking on WordPress.com. Hat tip: Jeremy Boyd.
Thomas Hawk takes a look at all the predictions people made for 2006 and how right or wrong they were. I don’t know why, but I love prediction posts because they get people’s imaginations going.
IN PRAISE OF THIRD PLACE — “[A] study of the performance of twenty major American companies over four decades found that the ones putting more emphasis on market share than on profit ended up with lower returns on investment; of the six companies that defined their goal exclusively as market share, four eventually went out of business.”
When you read about anti-spam problems like this with no recourse
, it means the spammers are winning. Akismet is platform-agnostic, and it already works great for all self-hosted systems, why shouldn’t it be available to people on Typepad? (Or Blogger.) If the folks on Fourth street don’t want to pay for an Akismet site license (though I’m sure we could work out a discount for their volume) they could just make it an option for users to specify an API endpoint, like a ping server address. This would also open up the market to anti-spam services besides Akismet, since anyone could clone the API if they wanted.
PayPerPost, a company I still consider highly distasteful (when you’re forced to change a core aspect of your business because of the FTC, that’s a bad thing) has bought Performancing Metrics. On the bright side, Performancing’s ad and Firefox products were not part of the deal.
Prototype.js != $(). I’ve been thinking about other JS libraries lately, like Moo, jQuery, and Dojo. (jQuery and Dojo both use WordPress for their blogs.) We need to make a final final decision about what JS framework we’re going to stick to for a year or more before we release WP 2.1.
A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. I’ve been considering a new laptop once Microsoft finally ships Vista and Sony et al start bundling it, but reading things like this seriously makes me reconsider. (I’m a big fan of the TX series.) I’d love to read a differing viewpoint. Hat tip: Simon.
Blake Ross has a good look at the Google Tip issue I blogged about the other day, and an interesting suggestion for a better way to do it. Tip: Trust is hard to gain, easy to lose.
I had read a few stories about Google services being advertised above search results as a “tip” but I hadn’t realized it was this prevalent. In their position if I was trying to get more users I might do the same, but for some reason this surprised me coming from Google. (It wouldn’ from Microsoft. Hat tip: Mark.
WordPress Wii Edition Plugin, so you can browse your blog from the Wii browser. I’ve gotten a Wii and it’s definitely the device of the season, it doesn’t do as much as the PS3 or Xbox, but it’s way more fun.
Why blog posts matter — 91% of the people who came to the permalink for yesterday’s post visited WordPress.com to see the new design. Online advertising is usually thrilled to get a 1-2% clickthrough rate. This is why I believe that online advertising as we know it is going to have to change dramatically in the next decade, beacuse the folks who matter are blocking it out, emotionally and technically. The shifting of money is also going to be the biggest threat to people media (blogs, etc).
We just made the redesign of WordPress.com live. Watch how when you make your window smaller the tags on the sidebar drop to the bottom.
“I am always hard to buy for” — Bill Gates in response to what’s on his Christmas list.
We’ve decided to open up 99% of our internal aggregate stats at WordPress.com to the world, really everything except our PayPal graphs. There are still some todos, such of the language signup information we track, but all of that will come with time.
Split Your MT Export File. I wrote a quick little web service to intelligently split large export files from Typepad and Movable Type into more manageable chunks.