I am picking up a bit of steam around writing for my blog, so it’s a good moment to reflect on why I blog—or at least why I seem to be blogging at the moment. My reasons are not wildly different from anyone else’s who blogs, I imagine.
1. Help Me Think
I find it useful to write about things in order to help me think about them. On that basis, I am very much the main audience for this blog. This means that, as a reader, you may often have no interest in some of the things I am writing here. This is kind of like thinking in the open. Sometimes it is efficient—if I want to share ideas, I can point to a blog post. Sometimes it’s nice to have a record of things to go back to, to see what I thought about something in the past.
Social media equivalent: MySpace
2. Amplify Things That I Think Are Interesting
Feed the socials! Feed the algorithms! If there is something that I think is noteworthy or that might be of interest to the kinds of folks I know, then sharing links is a low-effort, high-leverage way of doing that. I think it has more of a signal than, say, only social bookmarking.
Social media equivalent: StumbleUpon
3. Build My Own Reputation as an Expert Around Technology and Scholarly Publishing
I like being an expert, and I like the convening power and connection power that comes with that. I love connecting folks that I think can help each other, and being an honest broker in the space helps with that. I like maintaining that position, and blogging helps in two ways: it helps me keep up to date, and it is a public storefront for my thinking.
I am probably more circumspect on my own blog about my opinions than I would be if I were attempting to create that perspective on other sites.
Social media equivalent: LinkedIn
4. Actively Engage in the Future
I started building websites in about 1995 and started something like a personal homepage with minor updates around 1999 or 2000 (sometimes using web.py, a library from Aaron Swartz, and sometimes using Zope). I guess I started a proper blog around 2006.
If I were looking from then to now, I guess I would have had some predictions about the future. I don’t know what I would have gotten right—probably not much, to be honest—but without engaging in our vision of what the future might be, we can’t have any role in shaping its direction at all.
I like the idea of trying to think about futures. In some ways, thinking about futures also helps us come to terms with our present. The person who does this the best in their blog—of those that I read—is Matt Webb. I truly admire his writing.
I think the industry I work in is undergoing a number of long-run transformations: social, economic, technological, and political. Our essence as humans remains broadly the same, but the role that scholarship and science play in society continually changes—it’s never static.
I fell deeply in love with science when I was in my early teens, and that wonder about the world has never left me.
I have many operational obligations now, a much richer understanding of business models, more scars from failed projects, and many moments of having sipped from the cup of success. But I still want to engage in where we might be going, and in doing so retain an interest in these questions—an excitement and wonder about them.
I’m long-term optimistic—even if that is a harder position to hold this year compared to, say, 2012. I think the scholarly record is important, even if we don’t have full agreement on what it is or how it should be cared for. I think the networks, digitization, and technologies we are starting to see emerge have huge potential to build high-quality context engines, and those engines, in turn, will drive improvements and innovation that help us.
I want to write more about these things on this blog, so I think the general framing for 2025 will be around:
- Technologies that I think folks in our space should know about
- Things happening in our space that I think are noteworthy
- More general signals from the ether that speak to me, all building towards a sense of something
- Posts exploring ideas around potential futures
- Occasional personal notes (I won’t distribute those via email notifications, but they are part of this thing)
So, that’s going to be the shape of 2025, I think.
Social media equivalent: The WELL
So What Am I Not Blogging About at the Moment?
It’s not really a journal or life log, not a clipboard, nor really about tutorials (though someday I’d like to write more about development and product patterns). It’s not for recipes or reviews. It’s not a place for me to work through philosophy, nor is it explicitly for advice.
Social media equivalent: Reddit