March 2008 Archives

Congratulations to WordPress on the release of 2.5, "the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community." While we've had our differences, there is one thing that unites we at Six Apart and the folks at WordPress -- a passion for blogging. As Matt puts it, this release:

reaffirms that we're as passionate about blogging as the day we started. Our community is too fierce to rest on its laurels -- contrary to what pundits claim, blogging is far from "finished" and every improvement just whets our appetite for more. And more is coming.

It's important for the community to know that while we do compete, the steps each of us take on our own platforms also move blogging itself forward, and that's healthy for the medium. Blogging is in a fantastic growth phase. Six Apart is growing tremendously well, as are all of our products and services, and so are Automattic and WordPress. Blogs and blog based businesses are becoming stronger and stronger and blogging is moving from an experiment to a strategy among large media and the corporate world. It continues to expand globally and new forms of blogging, such as Twitter, and blog ad networks, such as Federated Media, are also growing tremendously well. We all have a passion for this, perhaps matched only by the passion of the millions and millions of people who use our tools and services every day, and there is more innovation ahead of us than behind us.

Six Apart is full of awesome people. Just awesome. It's full of bright, positive people committed to making a difference in the world. It's a joy to come to work with people who are so passionate, talented, and creative. I never worked at Apple, but from talking to friends who worked there in the formative days, I imagine its a similar experience.

This is one of the reasons that we are so jazzed by our relationship with Apple and have enthusiastically embraced bringing TypePad to the iPhone. Since the iPhone didn't have an SDK the first form of integration was web-based. And one of those awesome people I was referring to above, Walt Dickinson, who banged out the interface in a Six Apart hackathon, made it happen. Passion, talent, and creativity.

When Apple announced its SDK we got in line immediately to be a developer (with 100,000 other folks apparently!). Next up: a native app. Brought to you by more of those passionate, talented, and creative people (I'll blog about them when they ship it ;) ).

Here's some of the Everything TypePad post. I get the quote, but Walt and the team should get the credit:

Cool -- Ben made an MT plugin for Fire Eagle! Excerpt from his post:

So I was really excited last week to see the launch of Yahoo!'s Fire Eagle service, which is simple, privacy-aware, and most importantly, is now hooked in to Movable Type, using the new Fire Eagle plugin for MT. This makes my MT profile location-aware: I can add a map of my current location; changes to my location are added to my Action Stream; and other MT plugins can build off of the location to provide additional location-sensitive features. You can see it in action -- combined with the Action Stream plugin -- on David's site.

The new incarnation of Larry Lessig  (I have to admit I will miss the old Larry Lessig) will launch a new site:

Lessig will concentrate on building a new Web site: www.change-congress.org. The site will include a tool that will allow Congressional candidates to select their level of commitment to the Change Congress reforms, an application that will enable people to make donations to candidates who have committed to reform and a Web page that will encourage people to run against candidates who do not support reforms.

I don't know what the reforms will be, but this piece suggests that anti-ear marks will be one of them. My vote for what a Change Congress commitment should include: redistricting reform. It would be nice for the people to choose their representatives, rather than the other way around. With competitive congressional elections, something we simply don't have in the US Congress, many problems of corruption will be addressed. Elections are meant to hold politicians accountable, but with a 98% reelection rate, it's no wonder politicians don't feel accountable to anyone. I'm not saying that will fix all problems, but competitiveness in politics is where I'd start.

Deeply grateful for a tweet from on how things even out. Made my night. See, I've been pretty nice to Dick when I see him -- I smile and say "how are you?" and all that -- so finally he's done something for me. Things DO even out. My favorite part (but worth reading the whole thing):

Probably the perfect example of things evening out happened to me just last month. I was walking to the post office to mail a death threat. It was a beautiful day. I was happily singing away in my super-loud singing voice. I didn't step on any chewing gum, like I usually do, and when I threw my gum down it didn't stick to my fingertips. As I rounded the corner, there was a bum begging for change. I was feeling pretty good, so I gave him a five-dollar bill. At first I tried to make him do a little dance for the five dollars, but he wouldn't do it, so I gave him the five dollars anyway.

Not long after that, I was reading the paper, and there was a picture of the bum. He had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry! He had a little bigger nose and straighter teeth, but I'm pretty sure it was him. So, my five dollars had made him change his ways and become a chemistry guy.

Following up from our Movable Type Design Assistant announcement, we have brought the same to TypePad. If this was awesome for MT, it's awesome *plus* for TypePad. Here some excerpts from the Six Apart post:

As we have been saying for some time, we take design incredibly seriously at Six Apart. In that post, we were talking about empowering bloggers to have complete control over their blog designs. Today we take that next step in educating bloggers about design by combining the most powerful set of design tools available with the largest set of blog themes on any hosted blogging platform and making them all available as a free upgrade to all of our TypePad members. And you don't even have to be a TypePad member to get a look at some of the amazing new design capabilities.

The new themes on the TypePad service follow up on a commitment made by all of us at Six Apart from our CEO down, to making 2008 TypePad's best year ever. That commitment was met with an immediate response from hundreds of you in the community, and you echoed back a clear desire for more and better designs for your TypePad blog.

Read the rest of the post here (and check out the Everything TypePad post too). Congrats and a hearty thanks to the Six Apart teams who pulled this together.

From today's Wall Street Journal. We are no where near peak oil production nor some Malthusian catastrophe, but as Julian Simon showed us, rising prices will prompt technical innovation and we will most likely invest superior replacement technologies before we suffer mass shortages. This is of course one of the reasons Silicon Valley is investing heavy in alternative energy these days. The conclusion:

The world is not running out of oil anytime soon. A gradual transitioning on the global scale away from a fossil-based energy system may in fact happen during the 21st century. The root causes, however, will most likely have less to do with lack of supplies and far more with superior alternatives. The overused observation that "the Stone Age did not end due to a lack of stones" may in fact find its match.

The solutions to global energy needs require an intelligent integration of environmental, geopolitical and technical perspectives each with its own subsets of complexity. On one of these -- the oil supply component -- the news is positive. Sufficient liquid crude supplies do exist to sustain production rates at or near 100 million barrels per day almost to the end of this century.

Technology matters. The benefits of scientific advancement observable in the production of better mobile phones, TVs and life-extending pharmaceuticals will not, somehow, bypass the extraction of usable oil resources. To argue otherwise distracts from a focused debate on what the correct energy-policy priorities should be, both for the United States and the world community at large.