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.
Activity tagged "blogging"
i love the beginning of the year because everyone starts blogging. and if you (yes you) were thinking about starting, this is your sign
How a British-born hobbyist blogger became one of Big Tech's punchiest critics
i feel like Ghost doesn’t get enough love for this feature
give the brain a lil break today by hacking on the microblog. my books now show up in the activity feed and the reading list RSS feed.
now i'm going to go read my goofy dungeon crawler book
For anyone looking to adjust their media diet, now’s a great time to consider escaping The Algorithms with RSS. My blogroll lists some of the blogs, newsletters, and independent news sites I follow.
For feed readers, I use Inoreader, but there are many other good options.
“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.
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.
Even if you don’t plan to build a full website and start blogging, at least buy a domain, build a page that links to your other online presence. That way you can get started with little work and when you start to get ideas that don’t quite fit into any social platforms you’re in, you have a place to put it – and people you’ve shared your address before already know where to find you.
Here I get to share my thoughts in a place I control. I get to piss around and add/remove new features & eye candy as I see fit. And on top of all that, I get to have a place on the web that's 100% mine that (hopefully) expresses a bit of my personality too. All of that is extremely difficult on a cookie cutter social media profile.