Reading list
Shortform reading
This is an incomplete list of the shortform reading (and listening and watching) I’ve been doing lately.
The Case for Blogging in the Ruins
Virginia Woolf wrote about the importance of having a room of one's own: physical space for creative work, free from interruption and control. A blog is a room of your own on the internet. It's a place where you decide what to write about and how to write about it, where you're not subject to the algorithmic whims of platforms that profit from your engagement regardless of whether that engagement makes you or anyone else nebulously smarter.
Diderot built the Encyclopédie because he believed that organizing knowledge properly could change how people thought. He spent two decades on it. He went broke. He watched collaborators quit and authorities try to destroy his work. He kept going because the infrastructure mattered, because how we structure the presentation of ideas affects the ideas themselves.
We're not going to get a better internet by waiting for platforms to become less extractive. We build it by building it. By maintaining our own spaces, linking to each other, creating the interconnected web of independent sites that the blogosphere once was and could be again.
Blogging is so fundamentally native to the web that twenty years of commoditization has left it relatively untouched. We share information, freely.
How a British-born hobbyist blogger became one of Big Tech's punchiest critics
Dance like the bots aren't watching?
TL;DR: Why bother sharing anything on the open web if it's just going to be fodder for extractive, non-reciprocal bots?
I got an email from a guy who doesn't understand why I'd run a website without trying to monetize it. My response became a manifesto. Oops.
15 rules for blogging, and my current streak
This blog has been going since February 2000. I’m writing more now, two decades on, than I have for YEARS. That’s not just because of lockdown – it’s because, about six months ago, I set myself some rules. The rules, which are specific to me, are intended to bump me out of certain mental traps that I know will otherwise stop my words. And since these rules have been working for, well, 24 weeks now, I figured I’d write them down.
So here they are, my personal rules for blogging.
I prefer discussion in open web (their blog)
I have a bias towards discussion in the open that I know probably most people don’t agree on. Many like to keep the discussions in small circles and behind closed doors. And there definitely are topics where I like to do that as well, especially very personal ones.
In Make ripples through time and space by writing, under heading “From small private circles to the collective knowledge base”, I wrote about how I prefer questions in work context being asked in open channels rather than DMs where they only benefit the individuals in question.
An alarmingly concise and very hinged summary of what it was like to build this site from scratch
So now I have this space I built for me. A place I can feel proud of because I made it. A place that represents me and the way I want to present myself to the world.
A place for my voice to shine through. A real home.
#blogging · #digital-sovereignty · #indieweb · #programming · #web
This Publishing Platform Sees the Future, with Ghost's John O'Nolan (Podcast)
I think to have journalism with integrity, you have to have technology with integrity. And in my mind, open source is the way to have technology with integrity. And I want the best journalism to win because it's the best journalism, not because they have the best platform.
#activitypub · #blogging · #fediverse · #journalism · #open-source · #open-web