A great post by Matt about how P2 has changed our communication style at Automattic.
P2 is a WordPress theme. I’m currently using it on this blog as well, though it was originally developed for group communications.
Blog
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BuddyPress goes 1.0! Congratulations to …
BuddyPress goes 1.0! Congratulations to Andy and everyone else who has helped develop BuddyPress.
I remember talking to Andy for the first time in early 2008. He had blogged about taking the work he did for the ChickSpeak project and releasing it as open source, but found he didn’t have a lot of time to work on it. So we called him up to ask if he wanted to join Automattic and work on BuddyPress full time. He loved the idea and we made it happen. A little over a year later, BuddyPress 1.0 is born. Looking forward to what people will do with this exciting platform.
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Wired moves to WordPress
Wired has switched their blogs to WordPress (from Typepad). 9 of Wired’s 11 blogs are in the Technorati top 100 (according to Pingdom), so this move will further boost the already significant standing WordPress has among the world’s top bloggers.
PS: I found this cool tidbit while surfing the Wired blogs
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Blo.gs moves to Automattic
News today that Automattic/we have acquired blo.gs from Yahoo!. We approached Yahoo! a while ago to ask about their plans for blo.gs and were able to structure a deal to take it over. We plan to maintain continuity for blo.gs users. Matt has more details.
I don’t know if this is part of a larger trend of Yahoo! concentrating more on its core business, but I found Yahoo! to be refreshingly quick and focused to work with on this deal.
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Good points about decision making by Ste…
Good points about decision making by Steve Blank.
(via Jeremy)
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My results from okcupid’s political persuasion test (which I found on Mark’s blog):
I wonder what answers would result in a Totalitarian result?
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I enjoyed Bob Metcalfe’s talk and call …
I enjoyed Bob Metcalfe’s talk and call for “a squanderable abundance of cheap and clean energy” at GigaOM’s impressive inaugural Green:Net conference happening now in the Presidio.
Update: Video and slides are here.
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Ghostery
I’m trying a Firefox plugin called Ghostery. It shows the third party scripts that are used to track your behavior or serve ads or widgets on any site you visit.
For example, here’s what the New York Times uses:
WordPress.com (they correctly identify the three analytics systems we use):
AVC:
Most tracking scripts are benign, but it’s good to keep in mind that each one of those scripts has the option to keep track of you as you interact with a web site and then send that data back to a third party.
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Future of publishing
Great post by Clay Shirky about what’s happening to newspapers and publishing as we transition to an increasingly digital world.
Some choice quotes:
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data.
During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word, as books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, expanding the market for all publishers, which heightened the value of literacy still further.
When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.