Dave Winer has a great blog post, Your human-size life which covers wealth, success, happiness, and Peter Thiel. Hat tip: Toni.
WordPress is a Teenager
Thirteen years ago, building on the work of Michel and B2, Mike and I pushed the button on the first-ever release of WordPress. That means it’s now a teenager, which is blowing my mind similar to what I imagine real parents might feel at this stage. We now have 5-7 years of awkwardness and incredible growth to look forward to.
Good to keep in mind, especially as you’re making data-informed product decisions:
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
— Stephen Hawking
Anker has come out with a pretty cool new USB charger that also supports USB PD, which is the USB-C power delivery standard which means it can fully power a Macbook. So you can take the USB-C cable that came with your Macbook and use this instead of the white brick that Apple makes and other things as well, so fewer things to travel with. It will of course charge any USB-C devices like your Nexus phone super fast as well. I really hope everything uses USB-C PD in the future
If you’re looking for a fun Friday read, check out this story of a young GQ writer who gave control of his Tinder account to his Mom. It’s adorkable.
.Blog
It’s now public that Automattic is the company behind Knock Knock Whois There LLC, the registry for the new .blog TLD. (And a great pun.) We wanted to stay stealth while in the bidding process and afterward in order not to draw too much attention, but nonetheless the cost of the .blog auction got up there (people are estimating around $20M). I’m excited we won and think that it will be both an amazing business going forward and give lots of folks an opportunity to have a fantastic domain name in a new namespace and with an easy-to-say TLD. You can sign up to be first in line to reserve a domain here. If you have a trademark you can get in August, and then October for the “land rush.”
Marco Arment has a great take on how the decentralized nature of podcasting is a feature, not a bug, and Apple being more proactive there would be harmful to the ecosystem. As an aside, since I’ve been in Houston more recently, which means driving a lot, I’ve been really loving his app Overcast and I opted in to the optional paid subscription for it. I just need to get in more of a habit of listening to podcasts outside of Houston.