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Surely – hopefully – we’ll come up with a better name for it, but I believe that wetware will be a big, upcoming wave of change in technology. Wetware is the idea of putting computers inside our bodies. Sounds a little gross, but it makes a lot of sense that we’ll go there because of how two of the major themes of technology – networking and user interfaces – have evolved.

Networking: Computers get a lot more interesting when we connect them together, and we’ve been striving to connect more of them into networks and make it easier for us to access those networks. The first networks were local, a bunch of computers connected together in local area networks at universities and companies. Then the network moved to our homes, on our PCs and the internet. Then the network started to move around with us with wifi and laptops. And finally it has moved into our pockets with smartphones. As the network gets more ubiquitous and ever closer to us, it seems feasible that it would move into our bodies next – always there and even closer.

UI: User interfaces are about making it possible and ever more convenient for us to communicate with computers. We all know the evolution of how this works. It started with punch cards, then went to keyboards, then the mouse came along, touch pads, and today the ever present touch screens on our phones. This evolution looks like a move towards a more gestural and natural connection between us and the 0s and 1s of a computer. The next UI step could be an interface between sensors inside my body, likely my hands, and a way for computers to interpret those sensors without us having to move or touch a device anymore. Imagine moving and waving your hands around and your computer understanding what you mean (many people believe that our next step will be to voice interfaces instead – I’m less certain of that, though even in that case I imagine microphones will be embedded in our bodies).

Since two of the major themes of computing – networks and user interfaces – seem to be moving towards having computers inside our bodies, it looks to me like wetware, despite its ickiness factor, will become a reality.

I love running into @chrismichel, both because he’s a great person and because he takes such good photos. At Blue Bottle, with James Freeman:

A few thoughts of what it’s been like to blog every day for 4 weeks (minus weekends). First, thank you Om for challenging me to do it. I’ve never been a daily blogger, except for early stretches of photoblogging when I got my first camera phone in 2004. Recently, my blogging had come to a trickle, with a post every month or two, so it was a big change for me to blog every day. For the first two weeks, I felt quite a bit of pressure to publish, and I tried to think ahead for a few days of material. Then it got easier. For the last week, I just waited for something to catch my interest that day and wrote about it. I spent less time editing and rewriting posts as time went on, finding more flow in my writing – I hope this lasts, it’s the main benefit and joy I have gotten from blogging more. I did feel slightly guilty throughout this exercise about blogging too much – about wasting people’s time with my incessant posting. Another hurdle I still have to overcome is the feeling of “someone else has already written about this, and they’re probably a better writer”. Finally, I learned that if I wanted to purely blog for attention, I should write everyday about distributed companies and working from home – my posts about those topics get 10x more traffic than any others.

Hiten Shah
Self-funding versus raising money for your business
A farmer’s lesson for us all
Focus on what’s next
Learn about a company’s culture with these two questions
The hype cycle and how things become the norm fast
7 books that every lifelong learner should read (and reread)

Michael Galpert
What happens to Twitter?
The great “automated” scheduling race
Planning Trips is Cumbersome
This is not ok
Sofar Sounds

Om Malik
Clouds around the world
3 things to read this weekend
I am looking for a designer
Startups lessons from Netflix
Oneofmany is one of a kind
What is a connected speaker
Compulsion

Toni Schneider
At the body shop
The fragility of software
My VR memory
A grandstanding idiot
Lots of Renovo pictures

My 1985 biodiesel Landcruiser is in the shop, getting its “300,000 mile tune up”. In my case that has involved cutting out rust for the last two weeks and replacing it with new steel in lots of places. I went to check in on the car at the body shop, and they were OK with me wandering around and taking pictures of projects in progress:

I wrote this two years ago and for some reason never published it:

Software is taking over our lives – the way we communicate, learn, play, work, and shop. I’m both thrilled and worried about that. Thrilled because now that we’ve made the mind-boggling investment of putting computers onto every desk and into every pocket and connected them all via the internet, we can build and release infinite amounts of software much more cheaply and quickly than we can build pretty much anything else. And to my delight, the original hippie dream of the technologists who envisioned all of this back in the 1960s and 1970s has largely survived the attempts of businesses and governments to take control: Our various technology platforms, in particular the internet, are largely free, open, and universally accessible to anyone who wants to build a piece of software and send it out to the world. So why am I worried? For all its benefits, software is amazingly fragile. From a creator’s point of view, it requires almost constant maintenance for it to continue to work. The pieces of software I personally run right now – a web browser, email client, a blog, etc – are between a few days and a few months old. Most of the software I ran last year or the year before no longer works, and more crucially, some of the things I created using those older pieces of software stopped working along with it. I have notebooks from grade school sitting in a closet next to me. I can pick them up and they work just fine, the same as they did 30 years ago. Yet keeping my digital documents working requires constant maintenance, backing up, and transferring to new formats, or they simply become defunct.

There’s a concept of technical debt inside software companies. It means that poor software design choices upfront lead to major maintenance hassles down the road. As software takes over our lives, we should think about how to minimize technical debt not just in companies but at a societal level, to help avoid some major risks and headaches in the coming decades.

In 2014, Ben Delaney asked me to write down a memory from the early days of Virtual Reality. Here it goes:

I was in college in the early 1990s when Virtual Reality first rose to prominence. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen and immediately started plotting schemes for getting my head into a VR headset. I badgered the good folks at VPL Research, the inventors of the DataGlove, until they gave me an internship (and my first, unforgettable VR ride). A summer internship at Autodesk followed, working on their Cyberspace Developer Kit. At that point I was completely hooked on VR. In my last semester at college, I met a grad student by the name of Bill Chapin. We hit it off, and when I visited his office I noticed a bunch of VR gear. Turns out he was doing consulting for various VR startups, including Scott Foster’s Crystal River Engineering (CRE), the pioneering firm that invented 3D audio – a way to render real-time sounds in three dimensions, the exact way we hear them in the real world where we can close our eyes and pin point the location of a plane above our heads or a voice behind us by using just our ears. CRE was building 3D audio systems for all the major VR installations and they needed a software developer. Bill introduced me to Scott, and that’s how I got my first job. I was now an official, card-carrying member of the small, tightly knit VR community. I got to work on amazing projects with companies like Fakespace Labs and Interval Research and with great people like Brenda Laurel and Scott Fisher whom I had idolized from afar. I got to show off our VR systems at conferences like SIGGRAPH. Along the way I met Ben Delaney who was chronicling the ins and outs of our community in Cyberedge Journal. It was pretty much the most amazing three years of work I could have wished for. We tried many VR related ideas, at NASA, in university research labs, with architectural firms, the MoMA, Disney World, you name it. The one area that took off the most was gaming. Doom had just come out and first person 3D gaming was born. Our audio technology was a great fit for it, and CRE ended up working with several of the early 3D game developers which later led to CRE’s acquisition by Aureal Semiconductor where we put 3D audio into chips, sound cards, and PC motherboards. As the VR sector went into hibernation, my career went from sound cards to a digital music startup, to an email start up that was acquired by Yahoo, and then to blogging for the last eight years as CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. All along, I was hoping that VR would make a comeback. I’ve got a couple of Oculus Rifts on my desk right now, still getting a thrill every time I stick my head into a new VR world.

I’ve had this blog for over ten years, and I’ve never called anyone an idiot on it. Until now. Darrell Issa is an idiot.

Have you ever been in a crisis, maybe with your family or at work, and someone responds with calmness and clarity to that crisis? That person is prepared, knows what to do and jumps into action while everyone else is flustered? It’s a great feeling to be surrounded by people like that, people who are competent in a tense moment. I’d like to believe that it’s in everyone’s nature to act like that when it’s their moment, including politicians. When there’s a crisis, the politicians who happen to know something about it should spring into action and do a competent job. For some reason this never seems to happen anymore. To make matters worse, we have buffoons like Darrell Issa who jump into action with utter incompetence in areas that they don’t know anything about, making everything harder and more dispiriting for the people around them. Case in point: As chairman of the government oversight committee, Issa holds hearings about Ebola. He grandstands about all kinds of opinions and “solutions”, except he is so ill prepared that he pronounces the disease as “Eboli” and claims that it originated in Guyana (which is in South America). To me this rises above the usual head shaking moment about politicians, to a level that’s just plain depressing.

I had a chance to crawl around the Renovo Coupe and take lots of pictures today – it’s such a gorgeous car:

And a quick video of turning on the ignition:

Hiten Shah
Give faster feedback by easily editing any webpage
Facebook Rooms, Mobile Acquisition and Distribution Bets
7 lessons learned growing SaaS companies
Culture isn’t a chore
It’s easier than ever to acquire customers for your SaaS business
5 hacks to increase your daily consumption of information

Michael Galpert
Distrust for credit cards
October Music
Oliver Saks on Drugs
iOS 8 Search
Going To Where The Audience Is

Om Malik
Swing & Scratch
Instrmnt 01: Minimalist Delight
Let there be light…
Big Apple Conversations
Apple’s Swift has open source challenger, Phoenix
October baseball
Some new stories on Storehouse

Toni Schneider
WordCamp over the years
A great cause, especially now
Podcasts I like
Diane’s portfolio
A trip for the ages

Tomorrow marks the start of another WordCamp San Francisco. It’s the 9th one, if I counted correctly. The look of the WordCamp site has changed a bit over time:

WordCamp 2006:

WordCamp 2014:

But amazingly, most other things have stayed the same. The first WordCamp was somewhat spur of the moment. It was in early July 2006 when we announced the idea for a WordPress user conference to be held 4 weeks later on August 5th at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco (we actually just announced the date, the venue hadn’t been fully figured out yet – kind of amazing to think about now that we have to reserve venues a year in advance). Given the short notice and the newness of the idea, we didn’t know how many people to expect. So we were thrilled when over 500 people signed up, and then quickly got worried as we started scrambling to pull everything together. Our nascent “event skills” were put to the test, and despite a couple of hiccups – our badges were kind of a disaster and we had enough bottled water for a few thousand people – we ended up with an amazing first event with great speakers and energy. Our initial goals were to bring together the WordPress community, have the conference be very affordable (unlike most tech conferences), have speakers from within the WordPress community (instead of famous tech pundits), and serve a real BBQ lunch (from Memphis Minnies). WordCamp SF is now three or four times bigger and the venue is nicer, but the basic ideas and values are still in place and have helped inspire WordCamps all over the world.

I listened to an interview today with a German doctor who is part of Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF). He talked about Ebola and was impressively clear and convincing about the topic. I learned more in 20 minutes than in all the previous weeks of Ebola coverage in the news here. For example that MSF has been at the forefront of fighting this outbreak since Spring and that they’ve been sounding the alarm bells about its scale and seriousness for half a year, with the international community dragging their feet for an embarrassingly long time. His description of the conditions in affected countries, what MSF are doing to help, and why it’s pointless to panic about Ebola in Europe and the US made a lot of sense. The doctor in the interview is the head of a hospital in Switzerland, and he is headed back to Sierra Leone next week to help. It was a good reminder of what a great organization MSF is and that I had not donated to them in a while.

Colin tagged me to reveal what podcasts I listen to. I’m subscribed to a few, but these three are the ones I listen to frequently:
– The Slate Gabfest, a weekly political roundtable, smart, witty, occasionally subversive.
– Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, multi-hour long, epic history podcasts, told in a gripping and conversational style.
– The Rachel Maddow Show, her audio only podcast is fun to listen to, she has a great radio/podcast style and there are no commercials.

For my blog post today, I’m going to point at some work I’ve done over on Diane’s blog. I switched her site over to the Sketch theme and created a portfolio of her officially finished art pieces. Took a moment to figure out the portfolio feature, then was a piece of cake!

This summer I got the chance to travel down the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River. The trip was organized by a friend of ours, Tom Huntington, a former river guide who has traveled rivers all over the world. Our group was 18 people plus guides. Most of us knew each other from having our kids grow up together, and we all got very close on this trip. We spent a day at the Grand Canyon’s rim, then got up before sunrise to hike the Bright Angel trail down to a place called Phantom Ranch at the center of the canyon where we got picked up by the boats. Then we went down the river for eight glorious days, alternately floating, going over white water rapids, stopping for waterfall hikes and lagoon swims, and setting up camp on the sandy shores every night. Beyond the amazing scenery, history, and natural beauty, I felt transformed by the simplicity, quiet, and the closeness to the elements and to my fellow travelers. I was sad to have the trip end – it’s a place I want to go back to for sure.

• Michael Galpert: Dollar a day Cyclones of SF Define Success Toxic Employees iOS Keyboards (must read)
• Hiten Shah: Love it or change it It just works 17 books every startup founder should read Everyone on the same page (must read) Do hard things that scare you My favorite interview question for early stage startup candidates.
• Toni Schneider: The office space pendulum Deep linking Stop watching me Childhood confessions Nerd culture, the good and the bad
• Om Malik: Break 3 things to read this weekend Apple & rise of the carrier antagonistic SIM Card Mimi Valdes makes Happy Long day Why blame others