OPEN

It took until now, 30 years after the WorldWideWeb made using the internet easy, for more than half of the global population to get connected to the internet. There were a measly 1 billion people online then (about 16% of the global population). Now there are 4.5 billion (56.25% of people alive today).

It’s nearly twenty years since this blog was set up. What am I doing here?

Thinking out loud on the internet is a different game to a couple of decades ago when blogging became a thing.

Twitter was a place to think out loud for a while, but it lost its charm for me a long time before Elon decided to use it as lighter-fuel for the bonfire of his reputation.

Now that we are well in to ’23, it seems clear that Twitter really is dying. Twitter lost its charm for me a long time before Elon decided to turn into part of the self-immolation of his reputation.

It pushed out blogging as a place that you could share thoughts as they came. Meanwhile, at the time of writing, TikTok is ascendant and simultaneously delightful and malevolent. Facebook is an always on round-robin. LinkedIn is often quite useful, but noisy and lousy with “Ten Things I Learned By Reaching Out To You About My Product”.

Blogs look like home.

But what is this blog for? Nothing, last year, it seemed. In 2022 this one was completely neglected, while I developed Antonym, a weekly-ish newsletter sharing ephemera and thoughts. Kind of what a blog used to be. I have enjoyed learning how a simple newsletter works, and it also helped as a way of reflecting on things I’d read or seen the previous week.

It’s also served as a writing flywheel. I’m writing more than I have done in years. Not all of it fits in the newsletter. Not all of it belongs there.

I’m bringing this blog back as its original incarnation: a public notebook.