20 Years of Blogging: What I’ve Learned This week marks the 20th anniversary of this blog. I thought the best way to observe the milestone, and to try to pass along some of the benefits I’ve gained from keeping a presence online all these years, would be to share some of the most important...
The Missing Building Blocks of the Web At a time when millions are losing trust in the the web’s biggest sites, it’s worth revisiting the idea that the web was supposed to be made out of countless little sites. Here’s a look at the neglected technologies that were supposed to make it...
Real Web History There’s been precious little documentation of the real cultural impact that the social web has had, particularly in its earliest years. So it’s exciting when people in academia who are researching those topics share their findings. I was sent a set...
15 Lessons from 15 Years of Blogging This summer marked 15 years since I first started blogging here, and I’m happier than ever that I’ve chosen to live so much of my life in this place, with all of you. Nearly everything has changed for me since I began this blog, from major milestones...
The Semiotics of Like We don’t do nearly enough to examine what it means when we perform common actions on our social networks. These aren’t just guttural, reflexive responses! They are actions with meaning, choices that signify something emotional and expressive, just as...
What Medium Is First, some disclaimers: I’m writing this as I sit a few feet away from Medium’s NYC team. (I even asked them for tech support while writing this!) Ev Williams, founder of Medium, is an old friend of mine, whom I became a fan of as I was the first...
Where Tumblr Came From Seven years ago, my wife Alaina Browne and I were living happily in San Francisco when she went off to NYC to visit with our friends and attend a party. By the time she flew back, we were on a path that not only led to our return to New York City,...
I like blogging software. I lament the end of the personal CMS market; I was happy to back Ghost on Kickstarter today for the same reason that I back pretty much any effort at making blogging software — I think these tools matter. I find it interesting, and telling, that...
The first ten years of blogging are the hardest Congrats to Matt Mullenweg on ten years of blogging. I say it half-jokingly every time someone I know observes the decade anniversary of their blogging, but there really are key lessons about this medium that I didn’t figure out until I’d been doing...
Evolving Blogging First, a bit of background: Blogger, Google’s venerable and pioneering blogging service was created in 1999 by a small team at Pyra Labs, as an offshoot of the project management platform they’d originally set out to make. As one of the earliest...
If You Blogged It, It Did Happen At the beginning of this year, I wrote a piece called if you didn’t blog it, it didn’t happen, about how your thoughts, ideas and conversations need a place to live permanently over time if they’re going to inspire a useful discourse. And while...
If your website's full of anonymity, that might be okay Hmm, lots of interesting responses to If your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault, and even more interesting conversation about the topic of commenting culture in general. A few highlights from the last few days: My wonderful friend Caterina...
The Busta A few months ago, I introduced a blogroll on my site, making me probably the first person in more than half a decade to get excited about a blogroll. But my exuberance is based on the quality of the people listed there: I wholeheartedly endorse their...
All In Favor By request, a bit of explanation of how and why I favorite things on the internet. (Or favor them. Or like them. Whatever.) First, where do I favorite? On Twitter, certainly: I love lots of tweets! On Facebook! That’s mostly for liking things outside...
Out In The World It’s really gratifying to get to ruminate on things here on my blog and see echoes of those ideas the great work that other people do. Some recent bits of gratification: After talking about the open data from Health and Human Services as a “Health...
Heroes of the Web Great news for the web today, some of the smartest folks I know are doing what they do best: Making the web better. Take Paul Ford’s thoughts on “Why Wasn’t I Consulted?“, the driving inspiration behind much of what happens on the modern web. It was...
If You Didn't Blog It, It Didn't Happen Clive Thompson’s newest Wired piece argues that the flow of short-form messages as we see on Twitter and Facebook is encouraging longer meditations in other media. I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon for a while in terms of the impact that it...
Gawker Is A Blog. Just Like Twitter. I love blogs. Nick Denton wrote over on Lifehacker about the pending redesign of Gawker’s blogs, with a lot of great insights into the leading edge of web publishing today. As with any thoughtful, provocative writing of such length, it inspired some...
Call and Response Lots of nice writing out there that either replies to or references some recent posts here. Highlights: Dictatorship Versus Democracy in app store politics at Fast Company, by the always-genius Gina Trapani. A clear contrast between Mozilla and...
Call and Response As ever, the best thing about blogging is the conversations it kicks off. Some nice responses to recent posts here and around the web: In a follow-up to Gourmet Live and Rewarding Experiences, Mathew Ingram of GigaOm ruminated a bit about magazine...
Upgrades Some great responses to, and extensions of, the things I’ve been writing about lately In response to Forking Is A Feature, Rafe Colburn offers up The cultural implications of forking, rightly pointing out, “Linus Torvalds didn’t set out to change...
SAY, Goodbye to Six Apart I stopped working at Six Apart over a year ago. At the time, I didn’t blog about it because the departure was completely amicable and I knew I wasn’t sure what I would be doing next, so I figured I’d step back and watch the company for the first time...
The Power of the Audience As I write this, the Twittersphere is going through its annual love/hate paroxysms about TED. Every year, the conference seems even more an event perfectly calibrated to inflame the bloggerati: Inarguably great presentations combined with...
Nobody's Read Everything I’m going to be offline for a little while (some would say that last rant of mine was a sign I should have gone offline a bit sooner) so I thought I’d leave you with some good sites to check out that you may not have been enjoying. Dan C’s Lost...
Remembering Brad L. Graham I don’t believe in life insurance. When I die, I want it to be a bad day for everybody. – Brad L. Graham, February 2002 My friend Brad L. Graham died unexpectedly last week, at only 41. It’s hard to sum up someone so loved in a few words, but I...
The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real Pushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like...