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“My God, it’s full of stars!” – The Phenomena of WordPress

“My God, its full of stars!” muttered Dr. David Bowman as he steered his vehicular pod into the monolith of Stanley Kubrick’s classic film, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” He found his assumption’s of a flat, solid object to be incorrect as he plunged into a bottomless well of potential.

Last Saturday, I was not off the limb of Saturn’s moon Iapetus but on the campus of the University of Washington at WordCamp Seattle 2011. In this case, the stars were the 350 attendees who represent a sliver of the tens of millions of WordPress websites now installed.

I press often and hard that technology is not a universe but one of a myriad of galaxies in the universe that is humanity. From the first moment one of our small, hairy ancestors picked up a stone and smashed open a bone for the marrow within, found the stone wanting and fashioned it further, we were engaged in technology. Considering the amount of flint flakes and stone points found everywhere across the globe, stone tools were most likely the first Opensource technology as well.

Over the years, I have attended several hundred technology conferences. They have been focused on all the main themes: entrepreneurial investment, applications, operating systems, research & development, hardware, software, mobile, etc. You come to expect a given set of characters: pundits, pseudo pundits, neck beards, gear heads, chest pounders, plus the usual crop of mercenaries and opportunists. You also meet a handful of great people but they all have a statistical commonality, they were usually Young White Males.

A few adjusting clarifications, YWMs are not always Caucasian, there were and still is a large contingent from the Indian subcontinent and Asia as well. As fairly gross generalizations go, it holds true that this demographic is mostly young, mostly male and very technology centric. They and aging peers, that have migrated to management, form a perspective that represents the industry sector but not the general society at large. [More…]

Foreign Domains, Sure.ly You Jest

What does Violet Blue, a self proclaimed Open Source Sex expert and an authoritarian Islamic government, such as Libya, have in common? Well, just about nothing, unless you want your domain name to include the suffix ly, all the rage in name branding domains these days. Here also lies all the makings for a considerable conflict […]

H.264 Opens Up a Free & Clear Video Codec Landscape

Another salvo was fired in the battle for the future of Internet video today. MPEG LA is making permanent, thats forever, the royalty free use of their license portfolio for AVC/H.264 for free Internet video applications. The moratorium for payment was to be reconsidered in 2014 and recently extended to 2015 but as they say […]

Skype App Update 2.1.1 for iPhone

If you missed the update of iPhone iOS to version 4 and its highly anticipated ability to multitask then you also missed the sometime downside of this ability, rapid battery consumption. With the new iOS 4 and their updated app I could continue a call or text chat and jump to another app without dropping the […]

Camera+ Dodges and Ducks but Apple Rejects

After initial rejection by the app approval process of the Apple App Store, TapTapTap managed to get Camera+ approved. Two months later and a reported $500,000 in their pockets, the app is yanked from the App Store for violation of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement section 3.3.7. TapTapTap has been a successful iPhone app […]

Google-Verizon CoOpoly Galvanize Net Neutrality

If the intention of the Google-Verizon CoOpoly proposal was to provide a compromising way forward on Internet broadband policy, they may have gotten more than they bargained for as the Net Neutrality forces achieve a laser like focus. and turn their bright focus upon them. Verizon is no stranger to controversy, it strides confident across […]