Starts with articulating I've been meaning to write for many years about the oncoming AI-driven content flood: "The dark forest theory of the web: ... life-like but life-less state of being online... overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait... algorithmically manipulated junk... eerily devoid of human life ... liv…

"It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon."Provocative article, looking at the past 20 years as social networking evolved into social media - as I put it back in 2016, the evolution from social media (social as adjective) to social media, where the emphasis is on the noun."A social network is an…

Pretty good explanation of ActivityPub from Darius Kazemi: "ActivityPub describes ways for social network sites to talk to each other... [from] sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat... [to] New York Times ... Spotify. Basically any site where individual "users" create content and other people can subscribe to it could be A…

"the underlying problem is stubbornly intractable"Great piece, although I'm unsure that "a great proportion of the variance in “knowledge management” effectiveness across individuals is genetic", it is true that:productivity geeks exist, develop their system and then try to sell it.speaking from experience, it is really, r…

Another echo of one of my recent posts (Simplifying Zettelkasten by working out loud), but almost certainly published before: "One of my favorite ways that creative people communicate is by “working with their garage door up,” ... giving a lecture about the problems you’re pondering in the shower; it’s thinking out loud".Essentially this…

"more than 200 studies that show the positive effect of writing on mental health... but researchers don’t completely agree on why or how".One idea: "safe, confidential way to disclose emotions that were previously bottled up". But "recent studies show an increase in self-awareness ... could be the key". Turn your att…

"platform focused solely on professional publishing... open source tools for independent journalists and writers ... sustainable business around a free core application, funded by a premium platform as a service to run it on... non-profit foundation ... can never be bought or sold... [all] revenue reinvested into the product and the community…

Trump pulled the plug on his blog which, "On its last day... received just 1,500 shares or comments on Facebook and Twitter — a staggering drop for someone whose every tweet once garnered hundreds of thousands of reactions... Trump’s blog peaked at 159,000 social interactions ... on his blog’s first day." Downhill from day one.While his …

One of my favourite writers (offline and online) on his personal content strategy, first taking aim at the "tawdry and mercenary" version of "“why writers should blog”... the story goes, “and build a brand ... to promote your work.” Virtually every sentence that contains the word “brand” is bullshit, and that one is no exception.&qu;…

Reach outside your own site with federation via ActivityPub. WriteFreely lets anyone on Mastodon, Pleroma, or any ActivityPub-enabled service follow your blog, bookmark your posts, and share them with their followers. See how it works.

Books on note-taking... always too vague and boring, full of platitudes ... never an overarching system for turning notes into concrete results ... [but]How To Take Smart Notes ... is by far the most impactful and profound book I’ve ever read on the subject... most books are a few morsels of real insight wrapped in... fluff... I systematically unr…

my last column in this space is not about “cancel culture.” Well, almost... The quality of my work does not appear to be the problem... A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me ... orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in …

The Four Horsemen of this emerging Textopia are... Roam attempts to implement a near-full conception of hypertext as originally conceived by visionaries... looks like a cross between a slightly weird wiki and ... Evernote. It’s not... block-level addressability, transclusion ... and bidirectional linking ... utterly transform the writing experienc…

Medium was never something that we would get to define. Instead, it’s turned out to be an endless thought experiment into what publishing on the internet could look like.

Decades of studies have demonstrated a positive correlation between writing (particularly journaling) and health.... lower blood pressure, improved immune function, and fewer visits to the doctor... better relationships, improved memory, and more success at work... therapists often use journaling to get their patients to better understand how part…

research the critical trends and market conditions that are of importance to their clients and the company. From that commitment content flows at relatively low cost. It’s easy to write when you have compelling research to share, that has already been paid for by the strategic needs of the company.

the most recommended stories on Medium have either to do with startups, life or productivity. Sometimes, all three topics are squeezed in a single story — How to be super productive in your startup and change your life… If we can undo the follower bias, I think everybody becomes a writer and nobody really becomes a celebrity.

Back in 2004, I was one of about thirty people to become the first bloggers ever to get a press pass to a major party’s convention... we were the story. We were followed around by mainstream media, and at any given moment, at least a few of us were giving interviews on radio or TV... it was a great honor to be in the room for Obama’s breakthrough …

Find influencers, and partner with them to create Youtility content that helps people make better decisions about their home, auto, boat, motorcycle, etc. But at the operational level, this kind of program creates a number of questions, starting with, “What influencers do we want to work with, and why?”

I think Jason Kottke nailed it back in 2013...the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice... I think they’re still worth fighting for. Ultimately, it comes down to two things: ownership and control... There’s no guarantee ... platforms will be around ... ten years from now... Here, I control my words. Nobody can shut this site down...

I was taking work as it came in. Hustling, squabbling over rates, and trying to collect on long past-due invoices. I can feel the knots in my stomach to this day.I had no platform. My personal blog had 30 email subscribers, mostly composed of family and friends. I was burned out. My muchness was gone. I needed to get it back.

It’s tempting to merely argue that the recent crop of newsletters are what came to replace the independent blogosphere of the mid-aughts.... take a look at the subject lines for several of the newsletters ... Any web editor who plugged these as headlines into a CMS would be summarily fired... why are readers responding so well when they fly in th…

Facebook’s Notes feature is giving The Boston Globe another way to post directly to the Facebook platform... Notes, an early Facebook staple, stagnated for years until last September, when Facebook updated the feature with a cleaner, more customizable design and editing tool reminiscent of Medium. Unlike video posted directly to Facebook, there’s…

By the time Cameron wrote “Orbital Content” in April of 2011, almost all visits to A List Apart and zeldman.com were triggered by tweets and other third-party posts... SO JUST WHY are we afraid of Medium?

society had a pretty straightforward system of rewards: you give us something of value, and we’ll heap praise on you. It’s a fair trade ... that most social media gurus ... are unwilling to make ... insist on trying to “hack” the system... sheer laziness... shortcuts to notoriety rather than slowly, painstakingly, lovingly crafting something of va…

Here are 8 tips for using Medium effectively:

While the platform has long been a bastion of visual storytelling, it has also been historically lax with its limitations on gratuitous writing and hashtagging. That all changed today... An epidemic of hashtag fatigue is coming... The first step was de-prioritizing the hashtag in discovery feeds. The next step is burying it in yours... To e…

People are increasingly turning toward Instagram not just as a place to post filtered photos, but to spill their lives and thoughts into the captions as well... if you’re already posting pretentious, evocative images, you’re more likely to be in an artsy-musings state of mind... Facebook, at 1.5 billion users, has felt cacophonous and impersona…

in the first quarter of 2015, I began to notice fewer and fewer publishing notices from my connections and those whom I  followed; and I could tell that my connections and followers were receiving fewer and fewer notices about mine. - Arrogant Control Is Not Leadership... On Social Media or Anywhere Else | PHIL FRIEDMAN | LinkedIn

The hip but not trendy City Room launched on June 14, 2007, a year when “blogs were the wave of the future.”... The difference between a blog and a news site is no longer a meaningful distinction: all news is posted as soon as it breaks and is then updated. Just think: when was the last time someone used the word “bloggy” to describe the tone o…