The return of the weblog
How the thinkpiece model for blogging might not always be the right one
Every meaningful advance in my career came through blogging. I started my first weblog in 1998 (although I’ve had lots of different blogs instead of one continuous website), so I’ve had a lot of practice.
When Dave Tosh and I started Elgg, I blogged about it every day, and made sure to comment on at least one other person’s blog every day. He was originally skeptical, but I told him to try doing the same thing for a month; by the end of 30 days he had made new contacts all over the world. It’s how we got people to read our original whitepaper (no university or journal would have published it officially), and how we told the world about our software a year later.
When I left Elgg in 2009, I was writing a lot about decentralized social networks, which led to my being invited to speak at the Kennedy School at Harvard. Paul and Jade, two former TV journalists who had made the shift to entrepreneurship, happened to be in the audience. That’s how I became the CTO of their company, Latakoo.
In 2014, I was writing a lot about ethics in software, and some of my comments about Brendan Eich made it into the New York Times — the same day I had a meeting with Corey Ford at Matter. He told me he’d read my name in the newspaper after seeing me. I don’t know if it helped with his decision to invite Known into Matter Three, but it can’t have hurt. And the same was true in 2016, when he was beginning to think about hiring a Director of Investments: my writing on ethical technology (now on Medium, where I was working) was a factor in my being invited to join the team.
In all of these cases, it wasn’t the writing itself that made the difference: it was that my unfiltered thoughts out there, transparently. Blogging is distinct from journalism or formal writing: you jot down your thoughts and hit “publish”. And then you move on. There isn’t an editorial process, and mistakes are an accepted part of the game. It’s raw.
A consequence of this frequent, short posting is that the product isn’t a single post: it’s the weblog itself. Your website becomes a single stream of consciousness, where one post can build on another. The body of knowledge that develops is a reflection of your identity; a database of thoughts that you’ve put out into the world.
This is in contrast to a series of thinkpieces, which are individual articles that live by themselves. With a thinkpiece, you’re writing an editorial; with a blog, you’re writing the book of you, and how you think.
My pendulum has swung: I’m leaning back towards a continuous log, on your own domain. (Ideally, I’d still use Medium, because it’s beautiful.) Not only is it what people in my industry like Fred Wilson have always done, but it’s also what I’d prefer to follow. It’s not enough to read about ideas; I want to follow the people behind them and see how they evolve over time.
I’m experimenting with writing here every day. Although I think a chronological feed is vital to a blog — it’s a timeline of thoughts, which build on each other to form a cohesive whole over time — maybe it can be something like the same thing. Let’s see.
This is a personal blog post, but I need to point out: I’m looking for mission-driven startups helping to build a more informed, inclusive and empathetic society. Applications close on October 27th; here’s what we’re looking for.
