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Why I think Marissa Mayer should buy Automattic
PandoDaily reports that Yahoo! has sold half its stake in Alibaba for $4.5 billion. Their take is that Yahoo! needs one or two big products to turn the company around, and that Marissa Mayer should...
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Startups and growth
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham’s essays are invaluable if you want to be a part of the startup ecosystem. His latest, Startup = Growth, is required reading, and defines, once and for all, the...
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Access to free courses is a freedom of speech issue
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the State of Minnesota is requiring any degree-granting educational institution providing an online course to pay a registration fee: Tricia Grimes, a...
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Imagine this: identity computing
I originally wrote this over on Google+. I’m sat at my laptop, which has a monitor attached via a digital connection. On the other side of my desk is my phone, and a tablet. That’s the setup I actually...
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Why I wrote my own CMS so I could write a novel in a month
Growing up, I always wanted to be a professional writer. It’s still something I aspire to, but I get just as many creative kicks out of building software – and the pleasure is even greater when, just...
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Learning in hallways (with APIs)
I can’t let Clay Shirky’s piece, Napster, Udacity and the Academy, go un-commented-on: Open systems are open. For people used to dealing with institutions that go out of their way to hide their flaws,...
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Who to host with (domain names, web space, SSL, DNS)
I’m sometimes asked who I recommend buying web infrastructure from. Here’s my list based on my personal experience: Domains | SSL | DNS | Shared hosting | Dedicated hosting | Transactional email |...
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Goalfinger and Mozilla Persona
A few days ago, I released Goalfinger, a simple website that aims to help you decide what to do with your life. There are three stages: First, you enter at least 30 life goals. These can be as small or...
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Facebook Graph Search is super-powerful – if all your friends obsessively...
Facebook’s new Graph Search is an exceptionally powerful idea. Here are some searches I’m looking forward to running: Bars my friends like in San Francisco My friends who like Doctor Who and live near...
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Quiet hero
The geniuses, the nonconformists, the hackers, writers, lovers, activists and revolutionaries. Those should be our heroes. Aaron Swartz was someone to look up to. I didn’t know Aaron, but know plenty...
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Aaron’s army
This speech, in honor of Aaron Swartz, pretty much sums up why I work on the web. This is why it’s worthwhile. Aaron was part of an army of citizens that believes democracy only works when the...
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Confessions of a Cord-Cutter: How I Did It
You can cut your cord, ditch cable and put together a perfectly good home entertainment solution, TV and all, for a one-off payment of around $400. Here’s what I did. When I moved to the US in 2011, I...
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Google Reader is dead
Google Reader was a tentpole of the web I wanted: open, with full freedom of expression that wasn’t tethered to the platform you happened to choose to use. That web is now, largely, gone. Reader will...
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Silos, the open web, and selfdogfooding
Tantek Çelik has written an important post about silos vs an open, social web: The answer is not to not “only [be] relevant to geeks”, but rather, reframe it as a positive, and be relevant to yourself....
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Schneier: nationalism on the Internet is getting worse
Internet security expert Bruce Schneier is worried about the increase in Internet nationalism: For technology that was supposed to ignore borders, bring the world closer together, and sidestep the...
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Engine attribution
This site is (right now) powered by the WordPress open source blogging engine. If you hit “view source” in your browser, somewhere near the top, this is what you’ll see: <meta name="generator"...
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The Progressive (Profitable) Web
Ryan Holiday laments the loss of Google Reader and RSS in general in Our Regressive Web, arguing that if someone came up with them today, we’d think they were brilliant ideas: Nothing better has risen...
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HTTP signatures
It looks like I’m not the only person who likes the idea of signed HTTP requests as an authentication method. Joyent and Digital Bazaar have co-written an Internet draft for cryptographically signed...
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werd.io and idno
I’m posting over at werd.io, a site I’ve set up based on my idno software. I wrote a short technical introduction to the platform: idno is a personal attempt at building a publishing platform that...
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The IndieWeb as a minimum viable social web ecosystem
I wrote a post as a submission for the W3C’s upcoming Workshop on Social Standards: The Future of Business. Although there have been significant advances in the field over the last five years, there...
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