I recently returned from Orlando where Automattic hosted its annual Grand Meetup where nearly all of our 800 employees from around the world, spend a week together in the same place. (And yes, we’re hiring.) Despite being a fully distributed company, I believe it’s still important to meet face-to-face — just not every day, in […]
Category Archives: Ideas
The Value of Suffering
I once met a Zen-trained painter in Japan, in his 90s, who told me that suffering is a privilege, it moves us toward thinking about essential things and shakes us out of shortsighted complacency; when he was a boy, he said, it was believed you should pay for suffering, it proves such a hidden blessing. […]
Companies Die, Cities Thrive
“It’s hard to kill a city,” West began, “but easy to kill a company.” The mean life of companies is 10 years. Cities routinely survive even nuclear bombs. And “cities are the crucible of civilization.” They are the major source of innovation and wealth creation. Currently they are growing exponentially. “Every week from now until […]
On Microbiomes
Your body has about ten times the number of microbial cells as it does human cells. Collectively this bacteria weighs about three pounds, about the same as your brain. The evolution of our understanding of these bacteria has been evolving rapidly over the past twenty years, and I expect its findings to be the most […]
Password Coalition
Users use the same passwords for multiple services. It’s a fact of life, it’s just so easy to that most people end up having 2-3 passwords they use everywhere, including one “hard” one for financial sites, etc. The downside is your password is only strong as the weakest link of where you’ve used it — […]
Kindle Statistics
Dear Kindle Team, one of my favorite features of Google Reader has always been its “Trends” or more simply its statistics that give you insight into your reading patterns and volume. As the Kindle has become a bigger and bigger part of my life, much of my reading time has shifted from RSS-based sources to […]
DTD Magic
I want someone to write a DTD generator that looks at a given URL or referring page and creates a DTD based on whatever XML or HTML tag soup it finds. People crave validation.
Asynchronous Voice IM
I wonder what a true voice IM clent would look like. The beauty of I’m that is lost in clients like Skype is it’s impossible to maintain several asyncronous near real-time conversations at once. You can hear this problem is you ever listen to a taxi radio. Perhaps when you focus different windows it could […]
The Trouble With WordPress
Recently it leaked on a blog (there are few secrets in Open Source) that elements from a design known as “Kubrick” by Michael Heilemann would be incorporated into the default template for the next version of WordPress. Kubrick is many things: a design, a set of templates, some plugins, and a removal of a lot […]
Redirection Proposal
As many people have heard now, blogs that were previously hosted at weblogs.com are now needing to find new homes. Dave is going to be sending people their backup files but it looks like a lot of links may be broken, and some people proposed keeping a list of the old and new URIs. Why […]
Feature Creep: PowerPhlogger
When good projects go bad.
Temporally Challenged
Eric thinks that blogs are backwards. I think he’s turned around.
Link Archiver
(Pardon my verbification.) Here’s an idea for any website, though it could be particularly applicable to weblogs. I’m a reading junkie, I can’t get enough. When I come across a blog I like I often go back in its archives, which is a great way to get a feel for a site. It’s fascinating to […]