Tag Archives: Off-Topic

The Automattic Creed

Matt shared on his blog the Automattic Creed, which is how my colleagues and I live and breathe on a daily basis:

I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.

Working for with Automattic has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life and certainly the best job I’ve ever had. I love what I do and the impact I have in making the experience of WordPress.com users and visitors better each day.

If you’re reading this and think this sounds interesting, maybe you should consider applying.

Complimentary Spam

Royal Pingdom:

Go ahead, look through your comment spam. You’ll feel great. Here are people (uh, bots) who really understand you. There will be an abundance of comments mentioning how brilliant, fascinating, intelligent and just plain old great you and your blog posts are.

This has quickly become one of the most prevalent forms of comment spam, because pandering to the ego works. People will reach into their Spam queue and pull these comments back after Akismet flags them as spam automatically, then defend them as legitimate commenters—including replying to them.

And who can blame them? So many blogs rarely receive comments, so when one comes in that not only appears to be genuine, but actually praises the blogger, it’s hard for people to say no.

Want to make a blogger’s day? Leave a comment when you read something you like. (Real ones, not spam ones.)

Finding Snoopy

Discovery News:

The Apollo 11 mission that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the surface of the moon rather overshadowed the phenomenal achievement of the previous mission, Apollo 10. Without the bravery of Thomas Stafford, John Young and Gene Cernan, the moon first landing would never have happened.

[…]

As part of the mission, Apollo 10’s lunar module ascent stage — affectionately called ‘Snoopy’ — was discarded and sent into an orbit around the sun. 42 years later and it’s still believed to be out there.

[…]

“We’re expecting a search arc up to 135 million kilometers in size which is a huge amount of space to look at,” Howes continues. “We’re aware of the scale and magnitude of this challenge but to have the twin Faulkes scopes assist the hunt, along with schools, plus the fact that we’ll doubtless turn up many new finds such as comets and asteroids makes this a great science project too.”

This is like trying to find a needle in a haystack made of needles.

Disqus Ranks: Pecking Order for Your Comments

Douglas Crets for ReadWriteWeb:

Disqus is quietly testing an interface that allows site owners to rank and give credentials and labels to their commenters. The feature takes advantage of a trend towards being able to find experts through social search.

[…]

The commenting features mimic those already used internally by bigger publishers, who evaluate a user’s influence by assigning badges to confirm to the network and community some measure of a commenter’s significance.

Put simply, it’s gamifying comments, but there are some interesting criteria you can set up, and it’s nice that the site owner gets to weight the various “point” systems:

 

This brings comments a step closer to the kinds of systems you see in discussion forums.

Most People Still Want to Own Their Music

Digital Music News:

Yes, still: According to a study just concluded by eMusic, music fans overwhelmingly prefer ownership over streaming, by a drastic margin. That is, 92% prefer ownership of music over any other method, with unlimited playback and security of collections cited as top reasons.

[…]

Also encouraging for the likes of Spotify, MOG, and Rdio: modest amount in both camps (14% and 15%, respectively) indicated that they would pay for streaming access in the future.  But more than 40% expressed interest in cloud-based storage of the music they own, a nice nod to incoming giants like Amazon, Google, and Apple.

Still think it’s a mistake for Apple to not be going after streaming music memberships? This seems to indicate that iTunes Match is the right direction, at least for now.

For myself, I still buy CDs. I get the physical media, a higher quality, and I can rip it for my digital collection—in lossless.

I also wonder what this portends for streaming services like Netflix and if the numbers are any better for movies.