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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.

7:36 pm, April 15, 2012 :: right on

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