Rolling Jubilee is a non-profit that takes donations to buy distressed debt for pennies on the dollar, and then abolishes it. Donate $100 and they can take $2,000 off someone’s back. Seems like an amazing random act of kindness, you’ll never know who you helped. ∞
Wired writes on The 8 Missions That Should Dominate Obama’s Technology Agenda. I’m quoted there, but here are my full responses to the questions they asked:
1. First off, how did you monitor the election results – phone, TV, twitter laptop, twitter, bar stool?I was at a friend’s house with about a dozen people watching mostly CNN, and reading Tweetbot on an iPad Mini.
2. As someone leading a tech company (or as an investor), what are you looking for the president to do over the next four years? Are there priorities you have that the White House could help you achieve? Either from a business perspective, or a technological/hiring/infrastructure point of view?
At a macro level I hope the President keeps the economy on a path to recovery, and stays on the right side of anti-internet efforts like SOPA. What we’re building with the web is too early to be marginalized by special interests so early in its growth.
On a personal level, I hope he keeps fighting for protections and privileges under the law for my non-straight colleagues.
But the most important things we need to do will likely not have a big effect before 2016. As a country America needs to invest in its infrastructure, particularly broadband, education, particularly STEM, and in streamlining immigration, so the best and brightest who come to our shores aren’t shown the door when they graduate from one of the leading universities in the world. Four years is too short of a timeframe for these investments to pay off but that’s okay because I’m in business for the long run and I want to see our country strengthen and prosper over generations, not just the next economic cycle.
3. Were there any other races, measures etc. that you were particularly interested in, and why? What was the outcome, and why did you care so much?
I followed a few of the senate and house races, mostly as they related to SOPA and PIPA, and the state marriage equality measures.
4. Or, does all this politics stuff have zero bearing on what you are doing?
Even though the political process often frustrates me, I’ve seen its ability to influence the lives of my friends, family, and colleagues too many times to ignore it any more.
Voters boot three SOPA-sponsoring Hollywood allies from Congress, though the new people might have similar views on such legislation, don’t know yet. ∞
Let’s Limit the Effect of Software Patents, Since We Can’t Eliminate Them, by Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software movement (and WordCamp SF 2010 speaker). ∞
It’s interesting to read the contrast between the presidential endorsements (for Obama) from two of my favorite magazines, the New Yorker and Economist. Mayor Bloomberg was also a surprise. The Wikipedia, as always, has very comprehensive lists of endorsements for Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. ∞
What I Learned Building Medium (So Far), by Evan Williams. ∞
I’m really excited abou the new Jetpack, it includes toolbar notifications, mobile push for iOS, a new REST API, and fixes to the contact form. ∞
Pandora and Artist Payments, about how Pandora is paying out millions of dollars to artists but is only 6.5% of the US radio listening audience, the fees the rest pay are far, far lower. ∞
WordPress Is Probably Powering Your Favorite Candidate’s Website, from Mashable. ∞
Filed under: press
There’s a great article in Forbes today that covers some of the early days of WordPress through Automattic as a business today. I recommend everyone check it out! I wanted to respond to one bit about Automattic’s global nature though, which is actually timely because next week the entirety of Automattic is going to San Diego:
As a legacy of its open-source roots its 120 employees are spread across 26 countries and six continents. Although most work alone at home, each team–usually made up of five or six people–has a generous budget to travel. “All of the money we save on office space, we blow on travel costs,” Mullenweg laughs. Groups have gathered in Hawaii, Mexico and New Zealand. Once a year everyone meets for a week at an accessible destination with a solid Internet connection. A distributed workforce means Automattic can hire talent from around the world–without having to offer the perks and pay of Google, Facebook and Apple.
I’d like to counter the last sentence, which implies this is something we do as a cost saving scheme: being distributed is not a legacy, it’s a conscious choice. The people at Automattic are truly world-class — I invest in and advise a number of startups, and spending time in New York and the San Francisco Bay area I would put the caliber of people inside of Automattic on par or higher than anyone I’ve met from Google, Facebook, Apple, or any of the traditional tech giants.
How do we do it? Automattic offers a benefit above and beyond what they ever could: We give people the perk and the luxury of being part of an internet-changing company from anywhere in the world. This mirrors the meritocracy that makes Open Source great and treats people on the quality of their ideas and their work whether they’re in San Francisco or Argentina. (Or if they started in San Francisco and moved to Argentina.)
Even when big companies try to adopt this (sometimes under the lovely moniker “telecommute,” which reminds me of “horseless carriage”) people still face cultural resistance from their managers and teams, or find themselves as a second-tier citizen versus those in headquarters. The same often happens in “remote offices.” For it to really work it has to be part of the DNA of the company from day one. You have to be really committed to keep the creative center and soul of the organization on the internet, and not in an office.
I really believe this is the future of work, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger, a great article from Ars Technica. Also emphasizes why two-factor authentication is going to become more important in the coming years. ∞
Lukasz Lindell writesHow we screwed (almost) the whole Apple community. “We wanted to test this, how easy is it to spread disinformation?” Fascinating story. ∞
John Gruber has a great essay on the paradigm shift (yes I just said that) of the Retina Macbook Pro. Highly recommended. ∞
Filed under: Events
I had an amazing weekend at WordCamp San Francisco hanging out with hundreds of WordPress users from all over the world at the main event and the dev day afterward. Then on Sunday I was humbled to be featured on the cover of my hometown paper the Houston Chronicle in an article David Kaplan wrote following the 10-year high school reunion I went to (PDF).
If you wanted to catch up on the State of the Word address I gave on Saturday, the video and the slides are now online, or you can watch it embedded below. The slides are on Slideshare.
It was a pleasure meeting so many of you, and I hope it’s not next year before we meet again. Thank you to Michael Pick and Pete Davies for helping me out under tight timelines again.
A wrap party for Automatticians after the WCSF dev day. Photos by Sheri Bigelow.
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Hack Day at WordCamp San Francisco went really well. Developers from around the globe met up to work on WordPress. Photos by Sheri Bigelow.
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Photos from WordCamp San Francisco 2012 taken by Sheri Bigelow and Kevin Conboy.
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I’m putting together the State of the Word address for the upcoming WordCamp San Francicso, and one thing I like to do every year is highlight some cool WordPress-powered sites, especially ones that show off the power of the platform. I have a few in mind already, but are there any WP sites you’ve seen recently that really blew your mind? Leave links in the comments. ∞
