I just sat for five minutes waiting for a call to start that isn't scheduled for another hour.  That's the kind of me I've woken up with today! Happity Friday!

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Still pondering and burbling about rebooting/regrowing and this thing that to some is a living culture, to some is a media ecosystem, and to others is a learning journal/community. It's the thing that we used to call "the blogosphere" but that name doesn't really cut it with anyone now who wasn't part of it (or an observer) twenty years ago.  It's about owning your own alternative to facebook/instagram/substack/X etc without having to be a total nerd.  I mean, you don't have to be a total computing nerd, you can still (and should still) be whatever other type of nerd you are.  That's the point, this is about enabling all the kinds of nerds to nerd out about their thing, connect to likeminded nerds all over the world and maybe every now and then bump into other nerd gangs… or something (too many nerds! – Ed).  

It's for people who have something to say and would like to be able to say it in public, but without being bitterly criticised by strangers on the internet and without worrying that the platform they're building community around is suddenly going to disappear or worse – the "worse" scenarios include what Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification" but also the platform being captured by fascists, trolls or others who want to shut down open democratic thought and debate. PS enshittification can happen to pretty much any customer relationship you have these days, I don't think anything is a fix-all solution, but reducing reliance on commercial entities is a good way of mitigating the risk.

I also think that an undesirable effect of the way we've done social stuff on the web for the last while, is increased individualism and a decrease in mutuality – maybe it's just me, but I think it reflects the ongoing trend of isolation, which I hope is starting to turn.  Citations needed galore, but don't you think we're starting to get together in new (to us, not necessarily totally novel) ways? 

I also think it's connected to the downturn in linking.  Some platforms make it hard to do, others encourage a feeling that if you send people away, you'll never get them back and the idea that that's a really important thing to avoid.

We are inspired both by the Buckminster Fuller idea that "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete" and the principle of plurality, which I heard best articulated by Audrey Tang in Taiwan talking about "demonstrations", a word we associate with activists out on the street, but which she uses to mean "showing people another way in which things can be done".

Our solutions will be open and interoperable.  The best and simplest way to make interop work is RSS (yes it's still there, kids!). I can pull together in one place all the things that y'all make that emit an RSS feed.  I can't do that if you use something that doesn't.  

What does?  Yes, traditional blogs of whatever flavour you've got – I use wordpress.com, how quaint! – but ghost is popular, blogger still exists, squarespace blogs are a thing – your public posts on substack too.  But also your youtube channel for video, flickr for photos and mastodon & bluesky for microblogging (what we used to call tweeting).  

If you've got a group, where everyone is making some kind of media in at least one of those forms, and you pull all of the outputs together, it makes for a strong bonding experince between members.  The best bit, is when they start referring to each other and building on ideas together – especially if this is a group that also gets together in real life. 

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Oh god! the cleaners are here! Hide!

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I realised today that there's a lot of overlap between "Rebooting the Blogosphere" and "Regrowing a Living Culture".  The Coffee Mornings that I'm doing at the moment have that latter tag line and the question is coming up for me of how to regrow living culture online as well as off.  As a very bare minimum,  we have a shared google doc that people can put things in that come up in the Announcements slot at 11:00 – it's OK, especially for that group at this stage in it's development but I'm yearning for more.

I've spent today thinking about it in this frame: "If we were going to set up a kind of C4CC again, now, a space that was an intellectual and physical home to a number of groups and small organisations, how would we capture, nurture and nourish the knowledge creation activities of that network of people?"

In 2010, most of us were on Twitter, Facebook was going through an explosive growth spurt and although they were starting to tinker with algorithmic feeds, you pretty much got the latest posts from friends in reverse chronological order, Google Reader dominated the news and blogs via RSS ecosystem, Foursquare let you check-in to locations if you wanted to be found IRL.  The blogging folk at C4CC had taken a mis-step, but we didn't know it yet – we relied a lot on posterous which allowed creation of posts by e-mail (including attachments).  Not only was that useful for those of us who wanted to be able to post from anywhere, but it also made collaborative blogging easier.  I made one for people to submit and write about their "most interesting" flickr photos for example.  That link of course is to a salvaged version rebuilt on wordpress.com because posterous was bought up by Twitter in 2012 and closed down (with fairly clunky export facilities) the following year. 

Now, in 2025, Twitter is unusable for lots of people and there is no single place where that form of microblogging mixed with conversation still goes on.  Facebook continued along the feed manipulation path to satisfy its advertisers, Google Reader got snuffed out, flickr remains for now, Foursquare is Swarm, but it feels now like an underground game for people who can't let it go.

With all these changes, we now find ourselves in a place where it's hard to trust any big tech platform with something as precious as your own thinking.  But I think if we can get back to "small pieces loosely joined" and take responsibility for the ownership and stewardship of our data, there are opportunities for us to regrow what we had.  And the appetite is still there.  Often I come across it in people who didn't really get into this fifteen years ago, either because it was the wrong kind of nerdy for them, or because they were only ten years old then.

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I made some notes on the things I thought were important for trying to do this in 2025:

Everyone should have a place to publish that feels easy, and doable, and low-stakes. This is about reducing the barriers to publication – a newsletter or a blog (as most people understand it) feels like too much, like there are established formats that you have to stick to. Totally open microblogging either feels at risk from trolls/abuse or pointless because of the overhead of finding your people/having them find you. So I'm thinking of something where you can choose your own policy on openness and commenting. What if the collaboarition platform you're using now (Slack/Basecamp whatever) were open by default, but you could mark some things as private?

An RSS aggregator that does more than aggregate – by adding functionality to search & filter but also repost/link/reply (all subject to individual policies) it becomes a common knowledge store – it needs to not be Facebook!  Whatever small pieces you put together, they need to be interoperable and RSS is still a great way to do that (and it isn't owned by anyone).  I think that it's possible that the rise of the newsletter format has to do with the familiar functionality of email and that it feels like your own space.

People might just want a linkblog. A place to just share something you've seen somewhere, with minimal commentary – a lot of email groups I'm in end up with most of the traffic being this. As a group activity, it might become like del.icio.us – aggregated across the group with tagging. An extension of this is a reading list (of people/orgs outside the group) or externally facing blogroll.

Rich records of gatherings whether they're in-person or online. This is about bringing the discipline of minute-taking and sharing recordings/transcripts (with permission) to the things we do together.  Ideally, decentralised to all members of the group. What's the minimum expectation of someone attending a gathering – what norms do we want to establish about sharing back afterwards?

Some hierarchy is useful. So each group has it's own group blog/aggregator, but aggregation is also possible at a higher/more general level. If I am just on the edge of this network, I don't have to pick through everything else to find the things that are relevant to me, but I can see (and contribute to) the bigger pictures if I want to. This raises questions of autonomy and the principle of subsidiarity.

Writing is not the only fruit. It's important that learning can be shared through audio-visual media by those who find that more accessible.

Lo-fi is OK. This is part of lowering the stakes. If you're walking away from a meeting and making a voice-memo for yourself to remember the things that struck you, or If you've just sent someone a voice message and you realise that what you said might be useful to others (and doesn't breach privacy or confidentiality) then you should be able to post it as a podcast. Audioblogging and Videoblogging are still a thing! And transcription has improved greatly.

The overall purpose is to facilitate the growth of a web of knowledge (and thereby enriching connections between people) both by adding new content and adding links between existing content. Sometimes you'll want to turn your list of links into an essay, sometimes you just want to say ooh, I saw this and it made me also thing of that.  

There should be a way of capturing some of the value of all this in commercial products, the income from which should then be shared in an equitable way between the various contributors (including the network as a whole).

This is a bit of a jumble. I know there's a better way, or order, to organise these ideas in, but for today, my brain is tired. 

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I was just introduced to this use of the word 'palaver' to mean (in Africa) a way of bringing together a local community to creating social links and sometimes for conflict resolution.  The notable characteristic of it being a meeting where everyone has a voice but is not obliged to tie their contribution up neatly with references to all of the other speakers.  It starts out as the Portuguese for 'words' or 'speaking', gets attached to this, presumably traditional, way of holding town or village meetings, and then, with a classic colonial twist, comes back to Europe with the meaning of pointless talk that goes on without hope of resolution. We look at a process that works and can't see beyond what we would call the inefficiency or lack of sufficient intellectual rigour and so it passes into common usage as a derogatory exclamation – "What a palaver!"

I think the reason it caught my attention is that this reflects my attitude to my own blogging – I'm happy that it's rare for me to write something that is structured as anything more than a note, maybe a bunch of ideas that hold together but not necessarily with any explicit explanation.  Every now and then you might see something that looks more like an essay, but regardless, my own internal community nods and accepts that what's been said today is relevant and of value, even if it's not immediately obvious, or if it is actually totally obvious and doesn't need explaining or pulling out in this way over and over again.  It's OK, it's a palaver, and that's a good thing. 

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"If these spaces are important to extremists, shouldn’t they be important to you?" – Dan Slee's long read on what public sector people need to know about Facebook groups.  It's a clear and useful read for anyone who's not in the public sector too.

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Have I posted a link to Leave Substack lately? I'm still working out how and whether I want to participate in the getting people to pay you to email them business and how to offer that to the people who've signed up to me in Substack on the basis of recommendations from others (nice problem to have!)

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Spent the day yesterday talking and thinking about shame, especially in the context of activism.  It was a lot. I was grateful for the opportunity to sit quietly and do something with my hands for part of the session instead of being in constant conversation.  My headlines were – everyone's carrying an awful lot of stuff, all the time, no wonder there's so much rage and conflict  – most of that stuff is the same as everyone else's, but it's hard to feel safe sharing it – and it can be hard to accept that other people really are carrying the same stuff as you, surely my stuff is unique!

We did an exercise where everyone wrote something they were ashamed of on a piece of paper, folded it up in the same way and put it in a box, then we each pulled one out and read it out loud.  So there was a small chance that you'd read you're own out, or something very similar, but mostly you'd be reading something from someone else.  I found it interesting that many people put more than one shame into the box because we almost went round the circle twice.  Anyway it felt good to witness everyone else's feelings and to hear them coming out of your own mouth.  It's tempting to think "I don't have that one!" but when you hear it in your voice, perhaps you do, just a little bit less than you thought, maybe.

Just saw an invitation to an Open Space “How do we protect and strengthen democracy in Europe?” My mind went immediately to how to protect democracy from those who will use elected office to make sure that democracy isn’t available any more.  It’s not a simple thing.  And that’s what makes it a good question for Open Space – these things need talking through, with a load of different people, to get to understand all of it, rather than it just being my point of view.  I mean, I know (in this instance) that I’m not wrong, but how we make things safer (here in the UK it’s pretty urgent) with the current state of public discourse isn’t clear.

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This is all I managed on the train to Hard Art.  Despite what I imagine when I'm walking to the train station, experience shows that I'm not going to do much proper writing in the forty minutes to Waterloo.

Another Coffee Morning today.  So much in it.  I'd love to write a report, but it's all still whirring around in my head.  The first woman to become Archbish of Canterblobs, recurrent references to Bob Dylan, yin and yang and the serenity prayer, substack isn't just problematic because of politics and them hassling you to do stuff but also lots more.  I'm hoping others captured more. 

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The thing about having written at least something every day this week is that I remember that I can do whatever I want, without having to bow to an editor or even any audience, imagined or real.  That includes publishing things that are a meandering ramble or just a half-baked idea – if I was treating it like a magazine or even a newsletter, I’d feel like I needed to have some consistent standard that I met – and I think that’s what puts other people off doing it when I suggest blogging to them, they think they’ve got to be good and coherent and the stuff they make has to be defensible by them (as well as thinking it’s going to be attacked).  You get things over with people much better by demonstrating rather than explaining, so that’s where I’m going with it at the moment.  Writing an unpolished paragraph or two, if that’s all I’ve got today, which is what I do have.

I’ll be thinking about this “Rebooting the Blogosphere” idea for a while.  Interesting that the provocation for this thinking is FB “exile” – it reminds me of the energy that gets released whenever a platform goes down or otherwise goes awry – the energy of “I’ve got to find an outlet for these impulses in me, and this platform provided that, and now I’m angry/frustrated by the options that are left”. The experience for Typepad users over the last month or so is another of these (compounded with the grief at the loss of all those old thoughts, ideas and experiences once captured and now maybe somewhere in the Wayback Machine… if you’re lucky….) 

Some folk take that energy to the so-called “indieweb” – which is fine and works well for those whose temperament it suits. It’s always felt a bit to me like throwing the baby out with the bathwater (and then getting a new baby?) – or like “We don’t want to drive a Tesla, so we’re only going back to driving cars without electronics – don’t worry if you don’t have your own starting handle, I can 3D-print one for you…” I know that it’s not as extreme as that, but it’s hard to shake that prejudice, especially at the point where you’re feeling frustrated.

Steph talks about it being (or feeling) “easier” to hang out on The Socials. There must be some known cognitive bias here, like I feel it’s easier because I’m not actually taking into consideration all the things that I’ve lost – is that a hidden cost fallacy, mixed up with some loss aversion or what?  Each app feels easier but none of them do all of the things I want to do and even if they did, each one also comes with a different audience or network and a set of very subjectively experienced social norms for how you should communicate with people there. That feels like having five phone providers and you have to choose which provider’s subscribers you want to talk to before you can say anything, or else hack together something that copies your messages to everywhere and disregards local social norms so you look (and feel) like a robot.

On top of all this, we’re living in a culture where we are encouraged to take the blame/responsibility for everything that goes wrong around us. It’s never the system’s fault, it’s ours. It’s not the idea that five people are somehow allowed to own and control the majority of the economy, it’s your own stupid mental health, so do your stupid mental health walk. And if one of our tools doesn’t work for you, well suck it up, everyone else is having a great time using it – do better or go away.

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Today I learned that the Ray Noble/Al Bowlly version of this (the one you’ll know from “The Shining” or, I hear “Ready Player One”) was recorded in Abbey Road Studio 2 – just another amazing bit of musical energy in that space.

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So about that hypothesis…

I said yesterday that “algorithmic feeds of the For You Page type become, over time, the same as anonymous feeds of the 4chan type.”

What am I trying to get at here? What is it about anonymous feeds that stands out for me? I think it’s the lack of consequences. You can say anything you want and get away with it. If you are called to account, the people doing it are anonymous themselves (at least if they’re on the same platform). And funnily enough, it seems that allowing people to leave their human identity at the door, ends up with people not treating others in that space as human either (let alone the “others” on the outside), but that doesn’t seem to matter, because everyone’s in the same boat. Yes, everything escalates quickly, and things that would be outrageous in a newspaper are commonplace – this is the troll culture that you catch glimpses of IRL from time to time, some of it requires that you get immersed in the culture, some of it is more obvious, but like all cult(ures) the experience of being an insider depends on there being outsiders who don’t understand all the layers of what you’re doing.

And, as an aging guy, doing OK (so far!) under capitalism, and with a socialist heart, I am definitely not an insider (or even a well-educated student) of 4chan, 8chan or whatever anon imageboard site the “cool (not cool) kids” are into right now. But as a once disaffected youth who hated the world, yeah, I can dig the vibe.

There have always been annoying, nihilistic kids like this, but it feels like it’s bled into more mainstream culture of late – the good news about the internet has been that you can find your people, the bad news is that any awful person in the world can also find their own awful people.

Stephanie Booth has written a really useful three-part series on "Rebooting The Blogosphere" (activities | interaction | integration) – check it out.  

I identify with a lot of the reflections and ways of thinking about writing in public that Steph's pulled together.  I also feel the enormity of it as a project – we've strayed so far from the times when this kind of writing was the norm – the kind of writing that Dave Winer describes as: "the unedited voice of a person" when asked to define blogging.

That perceived enormity doesn't matter though, because although there's lots for each of us to do, we know (with decades of experience) that this isn't so much a thing that any of us needs do alone, the process of rebooting the blogosphere is by definition a communal act.  I'm grateful to Dave, Steph and anyone else who is keeping the flame alive.

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Something is coming together for me in understanding some of what's happening with memes in the wider culture (like the St George's Flag phenomenon in the UK).   It involves Doug Rushkoff's original concept of the media virus, Venkatesh Rao's Internet of Beefs and a hypothesis I'm feeling my way towards that algorithmic feeds of the For You Page type become, over time, the same as anonymous feeds of the 4chan type.  These things together mean that we have a situation where bad actors can win no matter which side they choose, that most media we're exposed to contains an element of grift and that it feels like there is a lack of consequences for lying or misleading people.  It's a jumble still, but writing it down like this helps a little. 

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Typepad dies today.  I worked out that I only used it to experiment with video at the end of 2005, so I'm not scrabbling to make a proper archive, there's only enough to merit a screenshot :). The lesblogs would have been the second one where we got a lecture in 'civility' from Mena Trott who co-founded Six Apart, the makers of Typepad.  Videoegg, referenced in the post at the bottom of this picture, went on to buy Six Apart (keeping Typepad but selling off Movable Type).