Monthly Archives: October 2009

Measurements That Matter on WordPress.com

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I know what measurements matter for WordPress.com, because they’re right there on the front page. Right now in the top left of “Freshly Pressed” it reads:

The best of 252,029 bloggers, 223,676 new posts, 327,799 comments, & 54,240,782 words today on WordPress.com.

Those numbers get me far more excited than page views and other “monetization” stats, because these right now front page stats reminds me blogging works.

These stats are about people expressing themselves (writing words) and connecting with other people (commenting).

These are the numbers I look to when I need inspiration.

SEO Experts and the Complex Web

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This could go on for days:

SEO Guy: I do x, y, and z, how is that bad?
Derek Powazek: X, y, and z isn’t SEO, it’s making good websites.

SEO Guys, please change your titles to Good Website Makers. I don’t care why, just do it. Derek Powazek insists.

Posted by Jason Kirk on 12 October 2009 @ 3pm

SEO Blocks

SEO Blocks by Vishraval. Wikipedia Hosted. PD Licensed.


Is the very witty comment by Jason Kirk on Derek Powazek’s “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists” published October 12th, 2009.

Derek’s intense, absolute position and lack of a shared language with SEO Experts leads to little opportunity for real discussion between the parties, but at the heart of Derek’s article is a sentiment shared by many web developers: we are extremely frustration that there continues to be a market for search engine manipulation.

This reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s “All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites“, published 16 March 2005. It makes me think that I’ll happily pay the price of having to put up with SEO Experts, if the alternative is a less flexible and diverse Web.

Three’s Company

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“Yourself, plus two others. With only two, each person needs to be aware of all the details in case the other person needs to take a break / gets run over by a bus / whatever. With three, the load is spread a bit more easily.”

Boris Mann, thoughts on Passion and Frustration, October 5th, 2009

Three lemurs eating by Tambako the Jaguar. CC by-nd. Flickr Hosted.

"Three lemurs eating" by Tambako the Jaguar. CC by-nd. Flickr Hosted.

From starting a company with Boris and Co’s Bootup Labs to being the area experts for your company, you want three of you.

3 is a magic number.

I’ve always just gone with having one backup, but reflecting on it now, I should have two backups in each area.

At first it seems like an incredible amount of redundancy, but someone’s own focuses and work doesn’t go away when they have to fill in for you. You need two backups, two people who can step in to carry your load — each carrying some of your load.

This extends beyond backing you up. This creates a mesh of collaboration,. Having different collaborators (back ups) in different areas leaves no weak links.

Disagreeing about something with your backup? With three there is always a moderator / negotiator / tie breaker.

Privacy, Our Expectations Need to Change

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“But our expectations need to change, too – especially our view of what constitutes a compromising or embarrassing digital trail. Maybe this high degree of openness will lead, not to a lot of red-faced adults in 10-20 years, but a lot less hypocrisy much sooner.”

Rob Cottingham, “CBC News – Consumer Life – Teens too open online: privacy watchdog“, Oct 8th, 2009

Export, the Second Feature

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Quartz by Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen. Flickr Hosted

Quartz by Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen. Flickr Hosted

I used to joke that the second feature to write is export. I don’t joke about it any more. Export is the 2nd feature you should implement for your software or web service.

There is nothing that says you care about your customers like making it easy for them to get their content out. Bonus points if you choose an export format that is already popular and well documented.

If you really love your customers, the exported data will be richer than the raw material they originally entered.

That, of course, makes import the 3rd feature to write. Don’t support importing from competing applications until your product is ready, because migrating from another product is already a scary enough situation without finding yourself using a buggy, incomplete product.

Free and Open Source from the Roots Up

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“Free and open source from the roots up. “Open source” can be much more than a development methodology. For me, it also constitutes a world view that upends institutionalized notions of competitive advantage that saw their apex in the twentieth century.”

Excerpt from Paul Kim‘s “Why I Joined Automattic” published September 9, 2009.

Freedom by Abnel Gonzalez, Hosted on Flickr, CC by

Freedom by Abnel Gonzalez, CC by, Flickr Hosted

I’ve come to think of the people who build open source and free culture into their businesses as not only having the creativity and resolve to put their values at the core of their businesses, but also the foresight and humility to know that the future is always built on the past, that the future is outside of their control, but possibly not their contribution.

This is one of the main reasons I so enjoy working with Matt Mullenweg, Toni Schneider, the rest of the Automattic crew, and the WordPress.com VIPs and WordPress businesses I get to so regularly interact with. I’m ecstatic that Paul has joined us!