Well, I think we have an answer. The government has no interest in keeping anyone's email safe, especially after an arbitrary 180-day period has elapsed. Instead, it has developed a very strong interest in making the details of our email, chats, social-media posts, phone conversations, and credit-card statements available to anyone in government who might have a passing interest in their contents, all to support some vaguely outlined notion of "keeping us safe."

This is wrong.

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.

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.

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.

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.