It’s been live for a few days, but now we have officially announced Gears support for WordPress.com.

WordPress version 2.6 ( currently in beta ) also has Gears support.

So what is Gears ?

Gears? It is a browser extension like Flash or QuickTime/Media Player. However Gears works with the browser to enhance web based applications. It can create local database and file storage, and run JavaScript in the background to update them without slowing down the browser.

Gears has been in the making for over a year and is well known among the web developers. Currently it supports Firefox versions 2 & 3 and Internet Explorer versions 6 & 7. Safari 3 support is coming soon.

On WordPress.com it is used to store all images and other web page components from the admin area to the user’s PC, speeding up access and reducing unnecessary web traffic.

The speed increase is most noticeable when Internet is slow or on high latency and makes everybody’s blogging experience more enjoyable.

How do you turn it on for your blog ?

To enable this new feature, click on the “Turbo” link and follow it to Gears’ site to install it in your browser (if not already installed). Then the browser will have to be restarted and after logging back in WordPress, click the “Turbo” link again to give permission to Gears to work on WordPress.com.

After that Gears will download around 200 files and store them on your PC. It will also update them when needed automatically in the background, no other actions are required.

Update: you can follow the coverage over on techmeme: http://www.techmeme.com/080702/p72#a080702p72

If you are in SF this Wednesday Yahoo is hosting a WordPress meetup:

We’re hosting a meetup of users and fans of everyone’s favorite publishing platform, WordPress. WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg will be joining us and the pizza and beer will be plentiful.

RSVP via Upcoming

Hope to see you there.

If you are in NYC the next few days and into reggae/world/israeli music, try to catch Mosh Ben Ari.

Sunday he’s playing a free concert as part of summer stage in central park and Monday night downtown in the lower east side @ Pianos — a great spot for music. Then Tuesday July 1 in Brooklyn at the Williamsburg Musical Hall

I was able to see him last week in San Francisco at the Independent and it was a great show.

For those who have never heard of him, here is a clip of a live show below, with tons of other clips and a 3 part interview of him all on youtube.

Earlier this week I was at Structure ‘08, an excellent 1-day conference put on by the GigaOm team, that focused on infrastructure and on-demand/cloud services.

Kara Swisher of AllthingsD.com asked Om, myself, and NetSuite’s CEO Zach Nelsona for our thoughts:

From Robert Scoble’s How is technology changing the world of Washington D.C.? post today:

When I walked into the Speaker of the House’s press room and saw a staff member (Jesse Lee, Senior New Media Advisor for Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi) typing a blog into WordPress, I knew the world had changed (I remarked that I knew that Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic which makes WordPress, was a smart guy from the first time I met him). That’s Jesse on this post typing into his WordPress-run blog.

Good post from Techdirt Will Always-On Gadgets Change The Way We Think About Knowledge? in response to Nick Carr’s Atlantic Monthly article: Is Google Making Us Stupid?. Nick Carr writes:

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Techdirt, for me, nailed it with these couple of thoughts:

Carr’s piece was sort of the modern equivalent of parents from a generation ago worrying about kids using calculators in school and forgetting how to do math. Of course, that didn’t happen. It just allowed individuals to better use the tools at their disposal to do even more interesting and complicated mathematics.

This becomes even more interesting when you connect it to studies that have shown the real determinant of intelligence isn’t necessarily how much you remember, but what your brain decides to forget

So don’t feel so bad about forgeting all that stuff - forgetting actually makes you smarter

A few months ago I switched from gmail to google apps for personal email and subsequently also moved over a few of my family members.  Little did I know that these family members have been secretly working on new cool gmail features as part of Google’s “Labs” effort.

Take a look at what appears at the bottom of my google apps email settings page

And joining the “Bar-Cohen Family Mail team” has many benefits:

The team
We work on lots of different things: making email better, faster, and more fun, and developing new ways for users to share and communicate with each other. We take on hard computer science problems — like making large amounts of Javascript run insanely fast on different browsers, storing and scaling petabytes of data, and ridding the world of spam. And Gmail is like a start up inside Google. You can build and ship new stuff quickly, and enjoy all the great benefits Google is known for.

Gotta love it ! 

Wild to think that it’s already been a year since I posted “Thanks Dow Jones, Hello Automattic” on my very first day at Automattic.

Thinking about the last year, it’s easy to sum up the experience so far with just two words: Amazing & Rewarding. A bit cheesy, I know, but 100% true

My other strong feeling about the last year is that above all else, people matter. When I think back to some of my M&A work in prior jobs, and various due-diligence projects where we did a deep dive on a company, I always held to the belief that beyond a stellar P&L, smart biz model, and various technology assets — what made a company truly great were the people.

And in that regard I’ve been fortunate in my current role at Automattic to be surrounded by smart, talented and motivated people who are also truly the kind of people you want to hang out with and play pool

Lastly with these kind of anniversaries, it’s always fun to look back and see what’s changed. Here are a few stats for WordPress.com from when I joined VS today:

May/June 2007 - Biggest traffic day: 8.07 million pageviews
May/June 2008 - Biggest traffic day: 35.5 million pageviews

May/June 2007 - Number of blogs on WordPress.com: A bit over 1 million
May/June 2008 - Number of blogs on WordPress.com: 3.36+ million

May/June 2007 - Unique visitors to WordPress.com: 40 million
May/June 2008 - Unique visitors to WordPress.com: 168 million

And as they say — the best is yet to come.

This site is for public information about the American Red Cross response to the June 2008 flooding in Indiana, Illinois, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, and West Virginia.

[ redcrossmidwestflooding.wordpress.com ]

In case you missed the live blog coverage of Gizmodo, here is a 60 second video clip recap by Mahalo Daily:

iPhone2 looks cool, but where is the MacBook refresh ?