Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

I was digging through old paper files this weekend and found a note I had scribbled on a hotel phone message notepad that read simply "Newt Gingrich and candles." Truth be told, I was doing a periodic office purge and happened to find a manilla folder of clippings, notes and sketches I had for a random book idea back in 1998. The Newt-onian mechanics actually sent me on a Talmudic scholar-like Google quest for the original quote (also verified here) which was along the lines of "If Thomas Edison invented the light bulb today, [the news] would report it as 'Candle making industry threatened'". Put the quote in historic context: Gingrich was railing against CBS News at the time, he was reacting to stories about how the budding Internet phenomenon was going to upset retail, and he was looking for a sound byte.

Political contexts often remain invariant over time.

I used that quote frequently when talking about Java, networking, and the .com boom of the late 90s and how the ability to directly interact with customers, consumers and potential users of your product completely reshaped distribution, and that any company that chose to ignore those factors would become less interesting. It is, and was, a matter of perspective on massive market disruption: opportunity or threat.

Market contexts often remain invariant over time.

I won't whitewash the current financial crisis: the markets are a mess, and we probably won't know the true extent of the mess until the cyclic graph problem known as counter-party risk is sorted out, assets priced or auctioned, and some senses of liquidity restored to the credit markets. But actually traversing these graphs and identifying the risks highlights the opportunity, rather than the threat - we have a chance, as technologists, to create the infrastructure, tools, and data management mechanisms underlying any improved transparency in the financial markets. In the words of my ever-cranky buddy Geoff, if you want to understand the risk of a zloty-denominated futures contract on the price of oil in emerging markets to be delivered to Eastern Europe, you better have transparent market information for all of the intermediaries and end points.

The information exists, but it's not evenly distributed or acknowledged. That is, by the way, what William Gibson says about the future. With the .com boom, we had the good part first, then the correction; I'd prefer to think about the current credit market crisis as the correction preceding the next build-out of financial market infrastructure. Compute grids used for Monte Carlo simulation of interest rate and credit quality future-looking scenarios, often used to price mortgage-backed securities, will not be the sole banking infrastructure that rebuilds confidence and velocity in the credit markets. Those scientific HPC systems are going to be supplemented by data-rich, "commercial HPC" installations to examine systemic, structural and market risk based on transaction data, market data, and multiple sources of public data: less prediction and more counting.

Thinking anything less lets financial candle-makers extinguish the possibilities enabled by the electric light bulb.

What would make 130 bloggers, mySQL hackers, PHP coders, writers, journalists, photographers, and other assorted geeks come into a midtown New York office building on a rainy Sunday morning when the Big Apple is more traffic impaired than usual?

WordCamp NY.

And it was worth every bit of logistical challenge -- even for those of us who just got to hear WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg go apolitical about the "State of the Word," including an update on WordPress 2.7, how plugins become part of the core, how the WordPress community is thriving, and why he does what he does (and he's becoming more of a softspoken Jimmy Wales and less of a PHP hacker elite, and I think that's A Good Thing).

First principles: Sun was a sponsor of this event, which was held in our midtown NY office, and the obvious question (asked by a few people) was "Why Sun?" In my opening, caffeine-addled comments, I tried to outline three reasons:

(1) mySQL, the database on which WordPress is built, is part of Sun, and therefore WordPress users are indirectly Sun software users, whether by intention or default

(2) WordCamp epitomizes the sharing of good ideas. Sun has always believed in building on the ideas of others and sharing our ideas with others, whether through standards work (think NFS), open source projects like GlassFish and OpenSolaris or direct employee participation in a variety of smaller open source projects like noodling around with WordPress plug-ins.

(3) The digital divide is an information one. Bloggers help bridge it daily. Every great consumer technology - cell phones, printers, GPS systems, digital cameras - had its start as a very high end, professional (read: sometimes military) version which came down in price and up in accessibility, empowering an entire host of users to apply the technology in new ways. WordPress gives the power of a rich publishing system (not just word processing, but producing something with a vibe) to individuals.

But in the words of Marty Debergi, 3 minutes was enough of my yacking - Matt Mullenweg provided data points that had me scribbling as fast as I was nodding and remembering to keep my mouth closed.

- WordPress has 3 core developers and about 90 contributors. It defines "good community" and "global" - the core team lives in England. And Florida. And Vancouver - one each.

- WordPress has hit the big time - it powers the NFL blogs and CNN's blogs, the latter of which provided the best up to date Hurricane Ike information available. With over 230M daily page hits, wordpress.com aggregate content is a "significant percent" of Internet viewership.

- There have been over 11M downloads of WordPress, with 2.38M new blogs this year, 35.8M new posts and a run rate of about 4M posts a month. In larger units of measure, that's the equivalent of two full English Wikipedias a month.

- There have been 18 WordCamps this year, with 9 more planned. Matt showed pictures covering the spectrum from a hotel venue that surrounded an outdoor pool to a restuarant to a formal lecture hall. My note to other-selfs: local organization is key; without Jonathan Dingman driving this in NY, there would not have been a WordCamp, and his able team of volunteers made this fly. Thanks, guys.

- WordPress, like OpenOffice and Firefox (nice company!) is a widespread consumer open source phenomenon. I had to think about this - but it's a very strong statement about the permeation of "that open source stuff" into not only the broad market, but the next broad market that matters: the people who have grown up empowered by consumer technology.

- Great distribution enables great customization. With an average of 4.96 plugins per blog, but a very long tail of plugins available, nearly every WordPress instance is unique. If I was looking for a powerful statement about mySQL, that was one that fulfilled the wish in an unexpected way. The underlying database schema, database tables, and interfaces are the same through (nearly all) of that dynamic range of plugins, but the combinatorial possibilities are measured in scientific notation. This isn't a case of powerful being good -- as Matt later commented, simple is good. Simple but solid enough to do the job worked -- which is why they chose mySQL and PHP to power WordPress.

- Akismet, the anti-comment spam tool, remains the most popular plugin, attesting to the widespread nature and depth of the issue. Matt's take: Spammers are clever, and if AI is going to be invented, spammers will do it first.

Nothing like hard data to make my hastily scribbled notes look good =- and get us thinking about WordCamp NJ this summer.