SHAD
Canada’s top MC? Introduced to SHAD last night by Ian D. Stewart.
“The only thing I love more than rapping is napping.”
Feb 12
Feb 12
The Ludicorp Business Philosophy
Ludicorp created Flickr back in the day. Via Kottke.
“Business owners do not normally work for money either. They work for the enjoyment of their competitive skill, in the context of a life where competing skillfully makes sense. The money they earn supports this way of life. The same is true of their businesses. One might think that they view their businesses as nothing more than machines to produce profits, since they do closely monitor their accounts to keep tabs on those profits.
“But this way of thinking replaces the point of the machine’s activity with a diagnostic test of how well it is performing. Normally, one senses whether one is performing skillfully. A basketball player does not need to count baskets to know whether the team as a whole is in flow. Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent.
“The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about. Likewise, a business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity.”
To which the Ludicorporate added: “The goal is to kick ass.”
Feb 11
Jan 20
pier 38 today
That is the Automattic Lounge on the lower left of the Pier. The weather the week ahead for SF, crazy for January, or, for that matter, June. 
Jan 18
Scott Rosenberg on writing in public
Scott is a co-founder of Salon, and this excerpt is from his essay on “Blogging, empowerment, and the ‘adjacent possible.’”
One way to assess the impact of blogging is to say that the number of people who have had the experience of writing in public has skyrocketed over the course of the last decade. Let’s say that, pre-Internet, the universe of people with experience writing in public — journalists, authors, scholars — was, perhaps, 100,000 people. And let’s say that, of the hundreds of millions of blogs reported to date, maybe 10 million of them are sustained enough efforts for us to say that their authors have gained real experience writing in public. I’m pulling these numbers out of a hat, trying to err on the conservative side. We still get an expansion of a hundredfold.
Each of these people now has an entirely new set of ‘adjacent possibilities’ to explore. What they make of those opportunities will shape the next couple of decades in important, and still unpredictable, ways.
Jan 17
Jan 2
2010 in review
Automattic’s amazing Data team launched a new stats project over the weekend. It’s an “Annual Report” that was emailed out to WordPress.com bloggers and contained the stats you see below, along with a helpful link to publish them out to your blog. I especially love that Martin, Joen, and Andy took the time to humanize the bigger numbers, so they become more comprehensible. Great start to 2011 for WordPress.com.
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.
Crunchy numbers
A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 10,000 times in 2010. That’s about 24 full 747s.
In 2010, there were 69 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 204 posts. There were 87 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 21mb. That’s about 2 pictures per week.
The busiest day of the year was January 5th with 276 views. The most popular post that day was Happy New Year.
Where did they come from?
The top referring sites in 2010 were automattic.com, Google Reader, ma.tt, twitter.com, and people.mozilla.org.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for google, pkb, paul kim, using bugzilla, and baron davis dunk.
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
1
Happy New Year December 2009
16 comments
2
Firefox Start Page Update November 2007
10 comments
3
A Good Day April 2006
15 comments
4
a non-developer’s guide to using bugzilla March 2007
8 comments
5
Bio February 2006
Some of your most popular posts were written before 2010. Your writing has staying power! Consider writing about those topics again.
Jan 1
Dec 30
Dec 30
Take the WordPress.com Daily Post challenge
If you’re a blogger and you’re looking for something difficult but rewarding to take on in 2011, check out Scott Berkun’s Daily Post challenge over at WordPress.com.
The Post Every Day challenge
Daily habits are the best way to make change happen. If you can remember to do something every day, by the end of the year, you’ll have done that thing over 300 times! Simple and amazing.
As part of the DailyPost, we’re launching two campaigns:
* Post a Day 2011: Post something to your blog every single day through 2011
* Post a Week 2011: Post to your blog at least once a week through 2011If you’re thinking big, sign up for PostADay. If you’re haven’t posted in ages, or have never posted at all, PostAWeek might be your speed. Still noble and bold, but perhaps more your style.
And of course, feel free to set your own goal – sign up as if you were doing PostAWeek, just so we can keep tabs on what you’re up to.
