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Big congratulations to the Sphere team for selling their company to AOL (and to AOL for a smart acquisition). It couldn’t have happened to a nicer and more talented group of people. I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with Sphere as an adviser for several years. My main early contribution was to bring together the founding team – Tony Conrad, Steve Nieker, and Martin Remy (they generously give me co-founder credit as well). I knew Tony, Steve and Martin from my Oddpost days (Tony was a VC investor in Oddpost; Steve and Martin had an RSS/blog search and recommendation product called Waypath that we were thinking of integrating into Oddpost). Tony had left his VC job and Steve and Martin were looking for a business person to help them grow their company. So I introduced them and they hit it off. I helped out with the initial Sphere launch as much as my job allowed (I was at Yahoo at the time) and they went on to build a great team, create a series of innovative content matching services, and sign up over 60,000 sites to use their products. I’ll also note that Sphere is one of a new breed of 100% virtual companies (everyone works from their own home offices and meets up in person every few months) – good to see a virtual company build a strong business and get acquired by someone like AOL.

The New York Times reports that two WordPress.com bloggers, Stuff White People Like and I Can Has Cheezburger, have received book deals. “Stuff” apparently got a $300k advance. The books based on their blogs are due out this Fall. Congrats!

Time’s been flying since we announced our fundraising. That news ended up getting a lot of attention, followed by even more attention on subsequent developments like the release of Prologue and the addition of BuddyPress creator Andy Peatling to the Automattic team. And now we have a major WordPress 2.5 release that’s getting lots of buzz and great early reviews.

At the moment, we’re working on the 2.5 roll out and some promising post-2.5 features, we’re growing our team (in addition Andy, Marianne and Nick have recently joined), our traffic continues to grow impressively (I just checked our Quantcast numbers: 144 million people visited a WordPress.com blog in the last 30 days – that’s a double digit percentage of the internet population!), and after a week in New York I’m happy to report that large media companies are continuing their embrace of the WordPress platform (150 WP blogs at the New York Times, dozens of new WP blogs at Fox and CNN, Fox also run their entire election coverage on WP, and many more). And then there’s of course Stuff White People Like, a break out new WordPress.com blog that’s been burning up our charts, giving CNN’s Political Ticker and the venerable Lolcats a run for their money.

Om, my friend, I’m thinking about you and wish you a very speedy recovery!

My platform is free biodiesel for all!

Please vote for me: Best Startup CEO.

And for WordPress: Most likely to succeed.

Here’s how the respective nominees compare on Alexa: CEOs, products. 🙂

Also, if you are into that kind of thing, check out how much money each company has raised (follow the Crunchbase links from the first two links above). Our growth-to-money-raised ratio is completely off the charts.

Now that I know at least three very smart people who use Dvorak keyboards (Andy, Iain, and Matt), I thought I might try one:

It’s been sitting in my office for a few days. Maybe blogging about it will make me give it a try?

A few weeks ago, I decided to do something about the hundreds of unread emails and RSS items staring me in the face every day. Even though I was diligently filtering less important emails and feeds away from my inbox and into sub folders, I was still getting too many “holy smokes! 273 unread items, oh wait it’s just my Swim Cap Fashion News folder” moments. My theory was that even though I was not checking those items very frequently, just seeing the folders bolded and the unread items count nagging me was a adding up to a significant distraction.

Here’s what I did about it:

• For email, I unsubscribed from every newsletter I could find, I added a bunch more filtering rules to send email that doesn’t require my immediate attention to a subfolder (which also keeps them off my Blackberry), and – most crucially – I started hiding all subfolders from view so I don’t even see anything other than the inbox. Out of sight, out of mind.
• For RSS feeds, I noted which feeds I was looking forward to reading and then unsubscribed from everything else. I went from 137 to 42 subscriptions. We’ll see how long that lasts.
• I’ve also changed my LinkedIn and Facebook accounts to never send me emails under any circumstances – Facebook has 28 email different settings to turn off! – which probably means I’ll forget to ever check those accounts again.

The end result? It feels like I got back an hour or two of uninterrupted time every day. I know I’m not literally getting that much time back, but the effect of reducing (or simply hiding) my unread items has been clearly noticeable.