Email's been here for years. But the reason Substack wants you to call your creative work by their brand name is because they control your audience and distribution, and they want to own your content and voice, too. You may not think you care about...

You might have noticed, it’s not a super fun time to be in the publishing industry, especially if you’re trying to do journalism. The years-long drumbeat of bad news issuing from nearly every newsroom has left people understandably despairing about...

This week marks the 20th anniversary of this blog. I thought the best way to observe the milestone, and to try to pass along some of the benefits I’ve gained from keeping a presence online all these years, would be to share some of the most important...

At a time when millions are losing trust in the the web’s biggest sites, it’s worth revisiting the idea that the web was supposed to be made out of countless little sites. Here’s a look at the neglected technologies that were supposed to make it...

There’s been precious little documentation of the real cultural impact that the social web has had, particularly in its earliest years. So it’s exciting when people in academia who are researching those topics share their findings. I was sent a set...

This summer marked 15 years since I first started blogging here, and I’m happier than ever that I’ve chosen to live so much of my life in this place, with all of you. Nearly everything has changed for me since I began this blog, from major milestones...

We don’t do nearly enough to examine what it means when we perform common actions on our social networks. These aren’t just guttural, reflexive responses! They are actions with meaning, choices that signify something emotional and expressive, just as...

First, some disclaimers: I’m writing this as I sit a few feet away from Medium’s NYC team. (I even asked them for tech support while writing this!) Ev Williams, founder of Medium, is an old friend of mine, whom I became a fan of as I was the first...

Seven years ago, my wife Alaina Browne and I were living happily in San Francisco when she went off to NYC to visit with our friends and attend a party. By the time she flew back, we were on a path that not only led to our return to New York City,...

I lament the end of the personal CMS market; I was happy to back Ghost on Kickstarter today for the same reason that I back pretty much any effort at making blogging software — I think these tools matter. I find it interesting, and telling, that...

Congrats to Matt Mullenweg on ten years of blogging. I say it half-jokingly every time someone I know observes the decade anniversary of their blogging, but there really are key lessons about this medium that I didn’t figure out until I’d been doing...

First, a bit of background: Blogger, Google’s venerable and pioneering blogging service was created in 1999 by a small team at Pyra Labs, as an offshoot of the project management platform they’d originally set out to make. As one of the earliest...

At the beginning of this year, I wrote a piece called if you didn’t blog it, it didn’t happen, about how your thoughts, ideas and conversations need a place to live permanently over time if they’re going to inspire a useful discourse. And while...

Hmm, lots of interesting responses to If your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault, and even more interesting conversation about the topic of commenting culture in general. A few highlights from the last few days: My wonderful friend Caterina...

A few months ago, I introduced a blogroll on my site, making me probably the first person in more than half a decade to get excited about a blogroll. But my exuberance is based on the quality of the people listed there: I wholeheartedly endorse their...

By request, a bit of explanation of how and why I favorite things on the internet. (Or favor them. Or like them. Whatever.) First, where do I favorite? On Twitter, certainly: I love lots of tweets! On Facebook! That’s mostly for liking things outside...

It’s really gratifying to get to ruminate on things here on my blog and see echoes of those ideas the great work that other people do. Some recent bits of gratification: After talking about the open data from Health and Human Services as a “Health...

Great news for the web today, some of the smartest folks I know are doing what they do best: Making the web better. Take Paul Ford’s thoughts on “Why Wasn’t I Consulted?“, the driving inspiration behind much of what happens on the modern web. It was...

Clive Thompson’s newest Wired piece argues that the flow of short-form messages as we see on Twitter and Facebook is encouraging longer meditations in other media. I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon for a while in terms of the impact that it...

I love blogs. Nick Denton wrote over on Lifehacker about the pending redesign of Gawker’s blogs, with a lot of great insights into the leading edge of web publishing today. As with any thoughtful, provocative writing of such length, it inspired some...

Lots of nice writing out there that either replies to or references some recent posts here. Highlights: Dictatorship Versus Democracy in app store politics at Fast Company, by the always-genius Gina Trapani. A clear contrast between Mozilla and...

As ever, the best thing about blogging is the conversations it kicks off. Some nice responses to recent posts here and around the web: In a follow-up to Gourmet Live and Rewarding Experiences, Mathew Ingram of GigaOm ruminated a bit about magazine...

Some great responses to, and extensions of, the things I’ve been writing about lately In response to Forking Is A Feature, Rafe Colburn offers up The cultural implications of forking, rightly pointing out, “Linus Torvalds didn’t set out to change...

I stopped working at Six Apart over a year ago. At the time, I didn’t blog about it because the departure was completely amicable and I knew I wasn’t sure what I would be doing next, so I figured I’d step back and watch the company for the first time...

As I write this, the Twittersphere is going through its annual love/hate paroxysms about TED. Every year, the conference seems even more an event perfectly calibrated to inflame the bloggerati: Inarguably great presentations combined with...

I’m going to be offline for a little while (some would say that last rant of mine was a sign I should have gone offline a bit sooner) so I thought I’d leave you with some good sites to check out that you may not have been enjoying. Dan C’s Lost...

I don’t believe in life insurance. When I die, I want it to be a bad day for everybody. – Brad L. Graham, February 2002 My friend Brad L. Graham died unexpectedly last week, at only 41. It’s hard to sum up someone so loved in a few words, but I...

Apple is justifiably revered in the worlds of technology and culture for creating one of the most powerful brands in the world based on the combination of some key elements: Great user experience and design, and an extraordinary secrecy punctuated by...

Pushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like...

While I’m still hard at work at responding to all the requests that have been made, I had to take a moment to mark the tenth anniversary of this blog today. I could ramble at length about the many ways in which writing this site has enriched my life,...

There have been a lot of great conversations around and about some of my recent posts; Here are some highlights. My post about Google’s Microsoft Moment seems to have really struck a nerve. First amongst the responses, from my perspective, is...

In two weeks, I’ll be marking the 10 year anniversary of blogging on dashes.com. I’m celebrating by making a simple request: Tell me what you’d like to see me blog about. I can’t guarantee I’ll get to every request that’s made, but I am going to try...

When I saw Malcolm Gladwell doggedly dissecting Chris Anderson’s upcoming “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (see Chris’ response here) my first reaction was: Brilliant! Chris Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired, and Malcolm Gladwell is a top...

Starting last week, New York Magazine asked me to participate in a roundtable conversation with NYMag’s book critic Sam Anderson, Improv Everywhere‘s Charlie Todd, the New York Times‘ Virginia Heffernan and David Rees, creator of Get Your War On. In...

Jay Smooth, “Please stop calling everyone and their mother ‘The First Rapper’“: U-Roy may be one of rap’s predecessors, and among the influences that laid the foundation for rap, but he did not invent it…any more than Jocko Henderson, Gil Scott...

FAIL is over. Fail is dead. Because it marks a lack of human empathy, and signifies an absence of intellectual curiosity, it is an unacceptable response to creative efforts in our culture. “Fail!” is the cry of someone who doesn’t create, doesn’t...

The whole worldA small number of super-geeky obsessives is abuzz over the upcoming launch of Facebook Usernames, an exciting new feature that will let you put some parts of your name into a web address. Since its announcement yesterday, there’s been...

Worth noting: Both independent bloggers on the web and the Associated Press are in the news this week for asking for appropriate credit for their work when it’s excerpted for fair use by online news aggregators. But the web natives frame their...

As always, I am trying to be everywhere at once. Here’s where I’ve succeeded: Dan Costa at PC Magazine offers a look at the rise of micro social networks. I get a nod there, but it’s more satisfying to see the idea itself take off. That’s an idea...

Right now I am here, but soon I may be somewhere near you! Let’s see where I’ve been lately, and where I’m going to be: Across the internets, Choire asked a ridiculous question of mine to Wendy and Lisa when he interviewed them for the LA Times....

Last month marked the ninth anniversary of me starting this blog, more or less continuously updating since then. As I begin my tenth year here on dashes.com, I’ve made a few changes around the site. First and foremost, there’s a new look to the blog....

One of the most satisfying and fun things I’ve ever seen in my job was the sight of my friend and coworker Michael Sippey onstage with Steve Jobs and the Apple crew, showing off TypePad for iPhone. In our line of business, Apple keynotes are just...

Today’s Blog of the Year Picks: Ask the Wizard and Fortuitous. Between these two blogs, there have barely been twenty posts this year. Yet either one alone could be the best small-business (or small tech business) site of the year. Dick Costolo,...

Today’s Blog of the Year Picks: Some Bits: Nelson’s Weblog and RC3.org. These two are just for me, some real old-school-blogging nerd picks. Some Bits: Nelson’s Weblog is the work of Nelson Minar. Formerly of Google (where he helped pioneer their...

Today’s Blog of the Year Pick: Serious Eats. I love food, but I could never quite put my finger on what was wrong with the food blogs I’d tried to read until Serious Eats came along. As it turns out, I like cooking and I like learning about...

Today’s Blog of the Year Pick: Ill Doctrine. Put simply, Jay Smooth’s Ill Doctrine is the best video blog on the web. (At least the best one that’s in English.) As you’d expect from the founder of hiphopmusic.com, Ill Doc starts from a base of...

This week, I’ll be highlighting the sites that I think stood out this year. July marked the 8th anniversary of my blog, and over these past eight and a half years, my appreciation of what it takes to run a successful blog has really grown and...

It looks like I wasn’t the only one having a Gawker reckoning; A remarkable post revealed that both Emily Gould and Choire Sicha are leaving the site. (Thanks to Rex for the link.) That post impressively uses Carla Blumenkranz’s words about Gawker to...

From lolcats to goatse to the Zidane headbutt, I’ve been at least tenuously linked to some of the web’s most notable and notorious memes. Naturally, when I heard about ROFLCon, a conference being organized at Harvard to celebrate online memes and...

From Paul Ford’s “$5 Chocolate Bar“: Brooklyn has squandered the treasures she brought with her when she burst out of her father’s brain. She’s thinking, they took the fire from Prometheus and made ‘smores. And then–just a flicker out of the Gowanus...

Phew! A warm welcome to my regular readers, now that I’ve had the misfortune of being visited by the worst of the rest of the web’s audience. I should have known that writing anything even mildly critical of Apple, or anything that appeared to be a...

The Donors Choose Bloggers Challenge that I wrote about a few weeks ago is almost over, and that means you only have a few days to help support the Notes for Class Challenge, an effort to help fund music education programs that have been proposed by...

I added this thing to my site (the HTML version, which most of you never see) a while back, and it’s gotten some interesting responses. I’ll reproduce it here in a post for your convenience. del.icio.us Profile Digg Profile Dopplr Profile Facebook...

I’ve been doing a good bit of speaking lately, and have some more coming up, so let me share it with you if you’re interested. I was flattered to have my post about Gawker quoted in passing by Jim Romenesko while talking about Vanessa Grigoriadis....

Put these in your browser, and shake well. Facebook apps are not a long tail. So says Chris Anderson, who oughtta know. The tougher question is: Since the recent changes to app distribution on Facebook’s platform, will there ever be another popular...

I’ve had the chance to follow Gawker Media since before it launched, really, and so it’s been interesting to see a couple of items pop up recently about the direction of some of its titles and practices. The big story, of course, is New York...

I’ve seen a number of people make reference to Facebook’s application platform without knowing a lot of background about some historical examples that might be useful to learn from. So, since I remember a good bit of info about these things, I...

In his post this weekend, Rex Sorgatz points out that “mainstream media is hard”. It’s a truth I know firsthand — I used to work both in the music industry and at a newspaper, and still get the chance to work directly with the people at the largest...

I’ve gotten a lot of really good questions (and some fantastically generous donations!) about the Donors Choose blogger challenge I wrote about yesterday, but by far the most common is “what should I do?” There are a lot of options, so let me make it...

I’ve been a big fan of Donors Choose for some time. It’s a charity my readers may well have heard of, which helps students in public schools by letting regular folks like us directly fund the requests that teachers make for classroom essentials. I’m...

I get a little self-conscious about the fact that I’m so earnest on my blog sometimes, since I’m kind of a smart-ass in person. But I figure I’ll never regret putting myself out there, even if it’s stuff that I’d mock myself for, if somebody else...

I try not to ramble on too much about my work, except for a little “I love the people I work with!” post every few months, but I did want to point out one satisfying bit that I was enjoying today. You see, when you work with a team that makes great...

A Brief Message seems interesting: Essays about design, in 200 words or less. Khoi explains some of the thinking, and the idea of a new design for each update reminds me in a nice way of the late, lamented...

I’d intended to post a correction to this NY Times story’s recounting of the history of blog book tours, but was pleased to see that my friend, and intermittent blogger, Jason Kottke has already done the legwork. For my part, here’s Greg Knauss’ post...

I found Nelson Minar’s thoughtful look at Larry Craig’s arrest to be very moving because of its deeply empathetic perspective. I find one of the things that frustrates me most about the public media sphere is the profound lack of empathy for people....

Mitch Wagner has a provocative, comprehensive, and entertaining look at the recent conversations about Apple and the enterprise over at InformationWeek entitled “Does Apple Have A Moral Obligation To Serve The Enterprise Market?” Though some part of...

Rule #1 in nerd blogging: jwz said it first. If you enjoyed The Enterprise, Apple, and Insufficient Ambition last week, you’ll want to read Jamie Zawinski’s essay that was so burned into my subconscious that I forgot it influenced me. If you want to...

I’ve found some nice responses to conversations I’ve had recently that are probably worth checking out. First, and most importantly, Soundwave: The Touch, the story behind Soundwave’s omission from the recent Transformers movie. Thanks to Nima...

I try to keep my social network as open as possible. Here’s the thing — I’m not talking about web applications that mimic real-world behaviors. I mean the real world. The people I befriend, collaborate with, and share ideas with are not constrained...

Before I crash for the night, I’d be remiss if I didn’t congratulate my incredibly talented and passionate coworkers and thank our unbelievable community. Movable Type 4 is out the door. I think it’s the best product launch I’ve ever been involved...

The Premise: Anyone who creates technologies that aspire to have significant cultural or social impacts on the developed world has to focus on both our lives at home and our lives at work. Anything less is an abdication of potential, or a failure of...

I moved back to New York City at the end of last year because of my wife’s work, and despite my love for my coworkers and the work they do. But the decision was made really easy by the fact that I was spending too much time with other people in the...

Daniel Lyons, author of the heretofore-anonymous Fake Steve Jobs blog, which comments extensively on companies in the technology industry, was also the author of Forbes’ November 2005 cover story “Attack of the Blogs”, a 3000-word screed vilifying...

Since everyone’s sending it to me, I’ll post the prescient Onion video from last week. The highlight, for me, is two minutes into the clip. Breaking News: All Online Data Lost After Internet...

Dunstan Orchard is a really nice, talented (and attractive!) man who is a terrific designer. But he has no sense of taste....

Two of the posts I’m most proud of having written last year are Making Something Meaningful and How do we judge our tools?. It looks like the sentiment behind those posts is catching on. Nick Bradbury on Conserving your limited attention: “When I...

Pentagram, the designers of the website, signage, marketing materials, and stationery for the new New York Times building, have a fascinating blog post about the intricacies of the sign that they’ve created for the new Times Square skyscraper. The...

Reflecting on toread is tobehuman: Dave Coustan says, “I use [this is good] to mark things I find particularly excellent.” Me too. Heh. And Ed Kohler asks about toread and howto, “Both tags do something other than describing the information...

John Scalzi shares a gem and kicks off a predictably stupid comment thread, based on an overheard coversation: “The problem with using the Web as a model for what’s really going on is that on the Web, Ron Paul is a presidential front runner and...

Andre Torrez: “My little experiment in tossing links out of the main blog didn’t work out so hot. I like linking things, but I don’t like the lazy feeling of stuff just showing up here at some point in the day.” Rafe Colburn: “I still haven’t struck...

I was very flattered and a little bit surprised to be interviewed by Claire Zulkey for her site. I’m a fair bit geekier than most of her regular interviewees, but it was still a lot of fun and I talked about parts of my day job and what goes into it...

Back in 2001, I got laid off from a job right around the same time as Sam Brown, the creator of Exploding Dog. Over the course of that year, as I looked for work and worked to remake a lot of my life, Sam spent much of his time creating illustrations...

Corey Spring has broken the details of a story that no one in traditional journalism had figured out yet. Wrestler Chris Benoit’s murder-suicide seemed to have been predicted by edits to his Wikipedia profile which mentioned the death of his...

There’s no better link-bait than science fiction where you’re one of the characters. See Kevin Fanning’s “How Everything Turned Out” in The Morning News. Old-school readers will warmly remember Kevin’s cover of the Bee Gee’s “How Deep Is Your Love”,...

There’s been a (mostly boring) conversation going between some blogs over the past few days regarding the line between editorial and advertising. Largely, this is a case of the same silly-meme-into-faux-fact path that I tried to document yesterday....

The gist: A lighthearted unscientific poll that was created as a PR ploy for a tech company is quickly evolving into a “real” news story, being treated as fact by mainstream press. That evolution from marketing effort to established fact can have...

When Matt Haughey first described his new site Fortuitous, which just launched two weeks ago, I was particularly excited because this is a new blog that’s actually downright necessary. You see, while there’s lots of “Ten Steps for Making Another...

Following up on the conversation about accountability, january one discusses the dark side of blogging from the perspective of the knitting blog community. This was particularly instructive for me because I’ve been wrongly using the knitting blogs...

Five years ago, I got my first death threat for something I wrote on my blog. The same week, some of those readers called my boss and tried to get me fired. A number of others publicly asserted that I supported terrorism. All because they felt that’s...

Are you in New York for the PodCamp NYC conference? Well, I’ll be there representing Six Apart and if you’re podcasting with Movable Type, TypePad, LiveJournal or Vox, then we should meet up. There are an astounding twelve simultaneous sessions...

A little while ago, my friend Michael Sippey, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing the other day, sent me a link to the new Google Voice Local Search. Now, this new services seems like a good product, and I know I’m supposed to say “Wow, cool!...

A couple of months ago, I got to talk to Lynne about business blogging for Fast Company’s podcasts series. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, though the lasting lesson you might take away from the conversation is that I talk really fast....

One of the reasons I admire my friend Mena is that she is remarkably prescient. I think it’s worth revisiting these posts that she wrote a year and a half ago. Her first post was a transcript of a speech she delivered, with the core concept that we...

I’ve found some interesting articles around the web recently that mention me or my blog, and while I don’t try to be comprehensive in linking to everything that mentions my name, I thought these were compelling enough on their own to be worth...

The exact thing you are looking for is out there on the Internet, if you just know where to look. So here are some hints. Making the connection between Girl Talk and DJ Drama, Congressman Mike Doyle (Pittsburgh represent!) breaks down remix culture...

It’s not the funniest joke in the world, but I’m very proud to have a tradition on my blog that is in its 8th annual incarnation, so here goes again: It’s the Panda joke! A panda walks into a restaurant, sits down, and orders a sandwich. He eats the...

I would just like to say thank you to all of you for supporting my site for almost 8 years now. This is an unbelievable...

When I first heard that Kevin Shay was working on a novel, it struck me as a little bit unfair. I know Kevin from his work with Movable Type; as we said on the MT blog, he’s been one of the most creative plugin developers around for years. But to be...

I was very flattered last week that GeekSugar post an interview with me and my wife Alaina that they did a few weeks ago. It’s strange enough to be asked to do interviews, and while we’ve both done a bit of public speaking and press, I don’t think...

A few months ago, I spent a lot of time trying to show the tech community I belong to that diversity is essential to our survival. Not just to the Web 2.0 world being healthy and thriving, but as a matter of life and death. Unfortunately, my diatribe...

This weekend, I’m making my first trip to Vancouver (and my first trip to Canada in over 3 years) to speak at the Northern Voice 2007 blogging conference. I’m really excited to get to meet a lot of new people, as well as finally getting to meet a...

Sure, Microsoft Word is fine for kids who want to write papers for school, but serious professionals should be very worried about using this dangerous tool! Just a few weeks ago, I found out about this poor Des Moines woman fired for Wording at...

I hate the abbreviation “MSM”. It’s almost always used by those who are lacking in perspective. We’re all either too lazy to actually differentiate between the technologies and types of media, or just don’t know much about media beyond our emotional...

I’m surprised how much I’m enjoying the conversation inspired by Marshall Kirkpatrick’s TechCrunch post about tech companies hiring well-known bloggers to help get the word out. I usually try to be pretty disciplined when I respond to things on the...

A couple Clay Shirky links for you today, one of which I just linked to, one of which I should have linked to last week, and all worth reading. In Defense of Ready, Fire Aim, a piece Clay wrote for the Harvard Business Review’s list of breakthrough...

How could I still give a damn about blogs, about the web, after all day, every day for eight years or so? Well, how could I not? Let me show you what it looks like to work with the most talented, most passionate people in the world. That video is...

Last night, I had the chance to attend the WNBC New York City Bloggers’ Summit. I’ve got a lot of different opinions on the event, some positive and some more critical, mostly based on my comparisons to similar events that have been held by local TV...

Here are the things to look at on the Internet today. India’s President, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, asks Yahoo Answers, “What should we do to free our planet from terrorism?” The answers cover the gamut you’d expect, but this is the most surprising stunt...

Last time, a rumination on video quality. Today, a look at [Ze Frank going Hollywood](http://www.observer.com/printpage.asp?iid=14010&ic=The Transom "New York Observer"), courtesy of the NY Observer. The nut graf, to me, is buried...

One of my favorite parts of my job is getting to write posts for some of our dozens of company-run blogs. I’m particularly pleased with two that went up today: Step Away From Your Computer: As a lot of people have noted, Vox isn’t just blogging,...

Every four to six months, Stewart Butterfield updates his website, whether the Internet is ready or not. This time, Sylloge ruminates on John Adams’ thoughts on education through the generations. The quote was a nice present to find on Christmas...

There’s a fascinating conversation taking place across a couple of blogs, which Steven’s post on leaving Brooklyn alterted me to. Douglas Rushkoff was mugged on Christmas Eve, and his wife Barbara blogged at length about her feelings at the time. (In...

It’s almost like all I do is talk about blogging all day. Debbie Weil hosts the Corporate Blogging show on VoiceAmerica’s business channel, and the other day we recorded a pretty interesting hour-long conversation. From Debbie’s description of the...

Andy Plesser of Beet.TV stopped by our offices at Six Apart a few weeks ago, and I had the chance to talk to him for a few minutes. Andy recorded the conversation on video, and now he’s just put up “The Simple Secrets of Effective...

Jason describes the blog commentor’s gaze, a rumination on how people who act unreasonably on the web fit some parts of the scientific definition of a psychopath. For what it’s worth, I was mostly just venting (posts that I write on weekends are...

A few days ago, I foolishly described a table of my blog archives as my favorite view of my blog. As with all posts that I only spend 30 seconds writing, it got some good responses that really showed how little thought I’d put into the whole...

From the New York Times story about Stallone’s new Rocky Balboa, Peter Sealey, who is a former film exec-turned-marketing prof a UC Berkeley, offers: It’s a high-technology, Google-blogging, iMac-type of premise going on there mixed with the classic...

One of the great things about having been a blogger for a long time is that I can present my old posts in interesting ways. I’ve been experimenting with a big table of every month that I’ve been blogging, since I started my current blog in July of...

Rex has compiled a fantastic list of the Best Blogs of 2006 that You (Maybe) Aren’t Reading. I’m flattered to be mentioned as a see-also suggestion, but mostly I’m just happy that someone has created such a list and that it’s well-done. Not...

Those who know me well know that I never really loved being in a classroom while I was in school; The whole experience, combined with my own lack of discipline at the time made grade school and high school unpleasant enough that it was inevitable I...

One of the most common questions I get from people who know about Six Apart is “What the hell do you actually do there?” These days, that question’s easier than ever to answer, but it involves explaining one of the goofiest parts of my job: My...

Update: The fellow who asked the question actually doesn’t want to participate in the lawsuit against Cohen. Wonders never cease! On Ask MetaFilter a month ago, a question from the friend of someone who was ashamed by the things he said on camera...

I’d mentioned that talking to regular people about the potential of blogging is one of my favorite parts of my job, and that’s probably reason enough to pause for an unapologetic plug. We’re doing a series of Six Apart Business Blogging Seminars all...

There are lots of different corners of the web, most of which have the good graces to be supportive and interesting and to act like, well, a community. People generally like to be social. But then there’s the high-profile personal websites, full of...

I launched a new design for my blog about two weeks ago, but I’d been waiting until I had a chance to shake out a few of the more egregious bugs to mention the new layout and to describe some of the thinking behind it. First, the page should look at...

Just a little geek note, there’s now a box that will appear the first time you visit my site (it disappears after the first visit) that will let you subscribe to my feed in your favorite feed reader, or to get posts delivered via email. If you...

Mr. Henninger, I had the good fortune to review your column, in which you express, at length and in some detail, your extreme distaste for people publishing their own opinions on the Internet. I wanted to let you know that I am glad that you have...

I guess the beginning of a new year is when you’re supposed to look back and be reflective. Looking at my weblog, the thing that’s most striking to me is that, especially as I’ve put more time and energy into doing my Daily Links, I’ve neglected...

Just wanted to leave myself a placeholder about the exceptional Gel Conference I attended today. Haven’t had a chance to write up my notes yet, (I’m so used to having wifi at conferences that I don’t even know how to take notes for myself without...

So, yeah, everybody’s gonna be buzzing about Google buying Pyra, but my take is that it’s not really that great a fit. Of course, Google bought Deja, which is the closest parallel as far as their acquisitions go. But Deja archived everything in...

So, after we’ve all graduated to using microcontent clients to navigate through websites, people whose weblogs are primarily read through their RSS feeds are going to get upset that they’ve lost so much control over the appearance and branding of...

Since I’ve already started to get a good number of people emailing and asking questions in regards to the Media Matters segment on weblogs, I thought I should take some time to give some background about me, this website, and weblogs in...

It may not be too late for TiVo to learn a lesson from Segway‘s success in lobbying legislators through the use of technology that’s compelling enough to sell itself. FCC Chairman Michael "Colin’s Son" Powell pronounced the TiVo he received...

So, I’m gonna be on this TV show in a week or so. (It’s on PBS, so air times vary, you’d have to click the "check local listings" to find out when it’s on in your area.) The segment on weblogs has quotes from a couple of us, including...

I mentioned earlier that the best way to protect your privacy is to control your identity. But, while proactive publishing of one’s identity is a necessary step, one of the other aspects to controlling identity online that’s going to become...

Another benefit you accrue by publishing your creations with more open licenses like the ones at Creative Commons is that when you get unanticipated surges in traffic due to being linked by a high-bandwidth site, savvy readers can know in advance...

Microcontent is information published in short form, with its length dictated by the constraint of a single main topic and by the physical and technical limitations of the software and devices that we use to view digital content today. We’ve...

Picture the following scenario: Microsoft has created a weblog tool that is designed to run inside the firewall at a company. It’s browser-accessible from any 4.0 or higher web browser and doesn’t require Windows on the client. It leverages their...