My friend Peter has been blogging for exactly 20 years yesterday. His blog is a real commonplace book, and way more than my blog, an eclectic mixture of personal things, professional interests, and the rhythm of life of his hometown. When you keep that up for long enough, decades even, it stops being a random collection and becomes a body of work, an œuvre. Œuvre really is the right word, according to Peter he’s written 2.67 million words. Novels on average have eighty thousand words, so Peter’s blog is over 33 novels long. Most novelists aren’t that prolific.
I’m a regular reader of Peter’s blog exactly because of the quirky mix of observations, travelogues, personal things, snippets of code, and reflection. To me the way he weaves all those things into one, is what we also tried to achieve with our Smart Stuff that Matters unconference (in which Peter participated): bringing global (technology) developments back to the size of your own home life, your own city life, and letting your life inform how you want to shape and use the tools available to you. So that, in the words of Heinz Wittenbrink (another participant last summer), when you discuss themes important to you, you actually are discussing the details of your own life:
To list the themes [….of the sessions I attended…] fails to express what was special about the unconference: that you meet people or meet them again, for whom these themes are personal themes, so that they are actually talking about their lives when they talk about them. At an unconference like this one does not try to create results that can be broadcast in abstracted formulations, but through learning about different practices and discussing them, extend your own living practice and view it from new perspectives. These practices or ways of living cannot be separated from the relationships in which and with which you live, and the relationships you create or change at such an event like this.
Heinz’ last sentence in that quote “These practices or ways of living cannot be separated from the relationships in which and with which you live.” is true and important as well.
Of the 20 years Peter kept up his blog, I’ve known him for 14 years almost to the day, ever since we met in a Copenhagen hotel lobby mid June 2005. Our first meeting was aptly technology mediated. As Heinz wrote, our blogging practices cannot be separated from the relationships in which we live. Traces of our connections are visible through the years, building on each others thinking, meeting up in various places, visiting each others homes. Not just our specific connection but the shared connections to so many others.
Blogging isn’t just a reflection of our lives, but is an active part in weaving the connections that make up our lives.
Next week Peter organises an unconference, called Crafting {:} a Life. Modelled after Elmine’s and my unconference birthday parties, Peter is celebrating not just the 20 year milestone of his blog and his company. He’s celebrating in the same way he blogs, the completeness of our lives, both the sweet and the bitter. It’s in that contrast where beauty lives to me, and how we can appreciate the value of the connections we weave. Elmine and I will go visit Peter and his family, with 50 or so others, on Prince Edward Island in Canada in a few days.
Peter recently said about our and other participants coming to Canada from Europe
“It is humbling to consider that each of these old friends is coming across the ocean to join us for the simple act of spending time together talking about life for a while.”
We felt the same every time we did an edition of our unconferences. Elmine wrote last summer, looking back on her birthday unconference Smart Stuff That Matters:
How do you put into words how much it means to you that friends travel [literally] across the world to attend your birthday party? … How can I describe how much it means to me to be able to connect all those people Ton and I collected in our lives, bring them together in the same space and for all of them to hit it off? That they all openly exchanged life stories, inspired each other, geeked out together, built robots together?
The simple act of spending time together talking about life for a while. is a rather rich and powerful thing to do, Peter, which packs the full complexity of being human. We look forward to seeing you, Catherine and Oliver next week, as well as 50 or so others that came to form your ‘global village’ while you were engaged in blogging a life.
Replied to Blogging {:} a Life by Ton Zijlstra
This is really nice. I’m still trying to pin down what it is that I actually want from the nebulous world of ‘social media’, and I think that this very human part of it, with lifelong friendships around the world, must be a big part of it.
My friend Peter has been blogging for exactly 20 years yesterday. His blog is a real commonplace book, and way more than my blog, an eclectic mixture of personal things, professional interests, and the rhythm of life of his hometown. When you keep that up for long enough, decades even, it stops bein…
Anil Dash reflects on two decades of blogging.
Some quotes that resonate:
Yes, maintaining a sustained online identity and presence is an opportunity, as it provides agency. The open web is an open invitation to do so, but it takes time to blog. Time that will not immediately result in dopamine triggering likes and retweets, so you will need to find the motivation for keeping up blogging elsewhere, likely within yourself. Even if you don’t have ‘substantive insights’ in your areas of interest but still consistently blog, there will be impact. I once had a client who hired me after reading my blog archives and realising from its tone and content I would bring the right attitude and outlook to the project. Over time any blog is a body of work.
Platforms have always maintained they are just platforms, and not responsible for its content. That argument has been severely eroded by the platforms itself, because their adtech business models depend on engagement, and so they introduced addictive design patterns and algorithms that decide what you see, based on likelihood of sparking engagement (usually outrage, as it works so well). A platform that decides what you see in order to sell more ads, makes conscious editorial decisions, and is no longer a platform. Roads and their maintainers generally aren’t responsible for the conduct of drivers, but in this case the roads over time have been deliberately increasingly designed to make you speed, reward repeat offenders by reserving the fast lane for them, and road maintainers get paid by car repair shops based on a metric of a steady rise in car crashes so road rage gets encouraged to raise revenue. It’s why federation of very distributed nodes is important to me, it strongly reduces amplification of the things that we’ve come to loathe on the platforms. That e.g. Gab, having been deplatformed, moved to federated servers is a good thing. Now anyone can round around it as damage, and its content doesn’t get the amplification and recognition by being on general platforms, it otherwise would. I am the only one on my website. I am the only one on my Mastodon server. At that level moderation is extremely easy, while it doesn’t reduce my interactions in any way.
Me neither, there’s huge potential for increasing agency, especially for groups in specific contexts and around specific issues. A networked agency emerging from lowering technology and process thresholds. It means taking ourselves as the starting point, not the platform or its business model.
Bonus pic: my friend Paolo blogging, 13 years ago in June 2006.
image by Paolo Valdemarin, license CC BY-NC-ND
Blogging usually doesn’t involve a pipe, sitting outside, prosecco, or a sea view from the Ligurian coast. Blogging is totally mundane, this the exception. It might be a good addictive design pattern for blogging though
Read 20 Years of Blogging: What I’ve Learned (Anil Dash)