Epigrammatic

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EPIGRAMMATIC — Fri, 04 May 2012 18:23:00 GMT

Whoa...the duo who run epigrams.com have names that are a bit familiar.]]>

★★★

EPIGRAMMATIC — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 19:36:00 GMT

I've never met Andy Baio, but his blog (and Anil Dash's, and Bill Keaggy's, and Jessamyn West's, and Matt Haughey's, and Josh Millard's...) has inspired me to keep my own blog going, in one form or another, for more than 10 years now. I haven't necessarily "achieved" anything with my blog in that time, other than having a place online to store my thoughts and projects, but I think these days, just having a space for yourself on the Web that you own and have built and have kept going for a significant amount of time is an achievement of sorts.]]>
It's like Robin Sloan's take on stock and flow on the Web—Baio's a master of both, and his flow is what keeps people coming back, while the stock is what you can spend hours browsing when you visit Waxy today. The easy persistence of long-term blogging reminds me of artist/gallerist Phil Slein's concept of a "creep," which is just what it sounds like: an organically grown display or exhibit or work of sorts, created by letting objects accrete in a spot over time and take on their own internal logic and form as a set. That's exactly what a good blog is—it may not grow a lot in any given month, but after 10 years, you really have something, if only proof that you were there and thinking all that time.

Baio's also a master of the one-off project—that's a big part of the delight of visiting his blog. Based on his tutorial, for instance, and iterating on that concept, I learned how to have the people of Amazon Mechanical Turk transcribe my interviews, which has freed up hours of my time for other things.

And that makes me think of the talk Haughey gave and posted a month ago—Lessons from a 40-year-old. My husband's just on the other side of 40, so the world view from the other side of the hill, as it were, is something I know pretty well. But thinking about Web projects from that perspective—as a long-term "lifestyle business," as something that's sustainable and adds to the rest of my life, rather than taking my life over—has definitely helped me keep my various small projects going, bit by bit, while also keeping the rest of my life going.

Cross-posted here in the MetaFilter thread commemorating Baio's 10 years of blogging.

★★★

EPIGRAMMATIC — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 14:40:00 GMT

Philip Marinovich calls his poetry book And If You Don't Go Crazy I'll Meet You Here Tomorrow. I'm borrowing that title for this horoscope. So here goes: If you don't go crazy in the coming days, Capricorn, I'll meet you here again next week. To be clear: There is an excellent chance you will be able to keep our appointment. The astrological omens suggest you'll call on reserves of wisdom that haven't been accessible before, and that alone could prevent you from a brush with lunacy. You're also primed to be nimble in your dealings with paradoxes, which, again, should keep you from descending into fairy-tale-style madness. But even if you do take a partial detour into the land of kooky, I think it will have an oddly healing effect on you. See you next time!

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Well said, Rob Brezsny. I've been reading old IM logs—and it's amazing how much I was misremembering or forgetting entirely about the way some things ended and others began. The reality is both better and worse than I'd imagined. Here's to good record-keeping.

★★★

EPIGRAMMATIC — Tue, 17 May 2011 21:27:00 GMT

Per Mat Honan's Gizmodo piece today on the lost origins of Twitter:]]>

"Twitter founder Jack Dorsey had a background in messenger culture. He had even launched a dispatch software startup called D-Net, back in 1999. He was also captivated by his friends [sic] status messages on AOL Instant Messenger. He wanted to combine the two. And in an era when AIM was king, he did just that."

So I wasn't wrong two and a half years ago when I pointed out just how logical it was to view Twitter as a successor of sorts to AIM.

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EPIGRAMMATIC — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 14:27:00 GMT

Bizarre. I clicked a link from Dave Winer recommending that a journalist be considered for hire—and not only did it turn out to be a former colleague of one of my former advisors, the second tweet in her feed turned out to be dissing the wife of one of my former editors.]]>

★★★

EPIGRAMMATIC — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 11:11:00 GMT

It's about time someone noticed just how much the journalism press is focusing on sales service Groupon, at the expense of covering things that are actually, you know, journalism.]]>
As I told a coworker last week, I haven't seen this much hype in journalism circles since the iPad first came on the market.

★★★

EPIGRAMMATIC — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 10:26:00 GMT

The results of this Pew Internet & American Life Project study provide new evidence that the younger set is becoming increasingly reliant upon centralized, networked publishing tools. Fewer and fewer people are carving out their own niche online...]]>

"Few of the activities covered in this report have decreased in popularity for any age group, with the notable exception of blogging. Only half as many online teens work on their own blog as did in 2006, and Millennial generation adults ages 18-33 have also seen a modest decline—a development that may be related to the quickly-growing popularity of social network sites. At the same time, however, blogging’s popularity increased among most older generations, and as a result the rate of blogging for all online adults rose slightly overall from 11% in late 2008 to 14% in 2010. Yet while the act formally known as blogging seems to have peaked, internet users are doing blog-like things in other online spaces as they post updates about their lives, musings about the world, jokes, and links on social networking sites and micro-blogging sites such as Twitter."

Great. More ephemeral, locked-in tales of the 21st-century human condition; less and less thought given to futurity (aside from the future profit margins of Big Content).

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EPIGRAMMATIC — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 09:20:00 GMT

Firas Durri's tweet this morning pretty much covers why I stopped reading a lot of journalism/blogging punditry:]]>

pundits always talking about seth godin or steve jobs or tom friedman are misusing their megaphone by staying in tiny slice of reality/ideas

Amen.

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EPIGRAMMATIC — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 20:47:00 GMT

Guh. Via this piece on ReadWriteWeb about the Tumblr outage:]]>

[The] fact that we suffer withdrawal when our publishing tool of choice goes down isn't just a symbol of our civilization's decline from meaning—it's an illustration of how much things have changed because of these new technologies that have ~~democratized publishing~~ walled off and balkanized publishing, creating a generation of dependents who haven't the faintest idea how to create their own website on their own server.

Fixed that for you.

This correction brought to you by the inimitable NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, which has kept all of my dumb pet projects up and running throughout the Tumblr debacle.

★★★

EPIGRAMMATIC — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:37:00 GMT

Well, this might shed some light on my earlier question. Whatever "high-tech incubators" St. Louis does have, they can't be doing all that well if no new venture capital has been raised here since this time in 2008.]]>
Think Square can save us from ourselves?