Someone asked me the other day, what I’d do differently if we got to have a Centre for Creative Collaboration again. The question’s been rolling round in me ever since.

My simple/simplistic answer is that I’d bring an Open Space frame to the new space that we found ourselves in – I’d want to start every day with a circle and check-in and keep a wall with the current issues pinned up all the time. We (whoever was there) would take that time to reconnect to whatever we’d done the previous day and decide together what we were going to do. We talked a lot in 2010 about C4CC being an ongoing unconference, but that was more of an organising metaphor than a set of practices that we used every day.

Speaking of which, here’s David Wilcox’s clip with me at UKGovCamp in January 2010 soon after my appointment had been announced.

I remember that feeling of liberation that came from not just using the term Social Artist to describe myself, but to have it as a “job title” conferred by someone else (thanks Brian!)

I’ve got used now to summing it up for people as “making beautiful things out of people (pause for chuckle)” but back then we were still working out what it meant and how to talk about it.

It’s also good to remember that it’s a convenient shorthand now to say that I helped run the Centre, but I was doing something slightly different from the rest of the team and if someone wanted a new Centre, I would want to be there in a similar role. Or put another way, I might talk about wanting to recreate C4CC, but actually what I’m after is another long-term residency, working closely with a leadership team.

And as with any other Open Space, the big work up front is in crafting an invitation and working out how to get it under the noses of people who might turn out to be the right people.

To be clear, nobody is actually asking this right now, I’m just getting clear on what I think so that when the time comes (how could it not?) I’m more ready and able to talk fairly coherently rather than looking startled and burbling.

The online versions of Living Culture Coffee Mornings are going great. It’s a really useful beat in the week for me. It would be lovely to see you in a small Zoom window on my computer this Friday!

Last week we did it face to face and the conversations are growing nicely, the snacks are always varied and quite fancy (it’s London innit) and new people often read the invitation fully and bring stuff along that they feel make the space more convivial – Catriona brought bunting… with tassels!

I got to hang out briefly with some people from eurosky on Monday – they’re a project coming out of the thing that started life as Free our Feeds. I’m still not sure what I think about the fractured mess of feeds that all say they’re not competing (ATProto/ActivityPub/RSS I guess) but who do kinda seem to want to win. I think RSS is easy to see as being a building block of the web, I can publish RSS, I can read it and I don’t need an account or a special server to do so – in contrast with the others that have more of a one-way feel and are really clunky to switch between. See this is why I need to write more, because my thinking is really fuzzy.

But because I’ve been poking into ATProto stuff a bit more I came across Leaflet which, as Richard MacManus says, feels refreshingly like a 2003-era blogging community.

I have a big backlog of links that I’ve saved to raindrop.io – I feel like I should be linkblogging these immediately rather than putting them in a big bag for chewing on later (but I don’t know whether I want to do that here necessarily). I do still have a tumblr, I suppose…

For those not aware, young people, on their Easter holidays from school, have been getting together in an unorganised way, that is to say, not for any reason that is legible to people over about 25 (unless those people do a tiny bit of work to summon up what life was really like when they were 15).

PS. Because we live in the future, this post was brought to you by an old git on his iPhone, so it might not all work as intended. But I marvel at the speed with which I can make this shit and press publish by the time the train is stopping at Woking!

Matt Jones writing in the frame of how the new technology is affecting our relationship to time (as new tech always seems to have done). I don’t know whether I’m rationalising this after the fact (probably) but I did feel a little unease while reading this, which I think I put down at the time to envy of anyone who can pull multiple ideas and sources together into a longish piece like this. The Colophon at the end was something of a relief, knowing that perhaps I’d heard a familiar voice mixed in with Matt’s, the voice of Claude. But it’s a weird mixture – not entirely Jones (I’ve been reading him for 20 years or more) but also not entirely chat-bot.

and then Jay Springett on his current process:

The work now is to mostly select from the surplus, exercise ones taste, and decide what can be left out. It’s in this sense that writing becomes a process of reduction. To use a metaphor from the kitchen, it’s like making a roux or vegetable stock.

Both seem to me to be pointing to a way of working that’s like having an indefatigable, bright research assistant who gets your way of thinking and expressing yourself, providing a much better first draft than you might expect. And as with taking on a real-life assistant like that, your work shifts to being able to express your intentions clearly, point the kid in the right directions and then polish up/reduce down what they come back to you with.

We’ve been having coffee (and often cake and biscuits) on the first Friday of every month at Essex Hall under the heading of “Living Culture Coffee Mornings” for just over a year now. It works brilliantly for some people, not so well for others. And, of course, there are people born every day who haven’t even heard of it.

We’re going to keep doing them in person on the first Friday, but I will also open up some space for the conversation online so that we can include people who can’t necessarily make it to London (specifically WC2) for a couple of hours.

The online version will be on Zoom at the same time – 10am till midday on all the other Fridays except the first… maybe. There won’t be a hybrid one on First Fridays – hybrid just doesn’t work for this kind of conversation – but if we find there are people who come every week online, and there’s someone who can hold the space then that can go on at the same time as the in-person one.

The main differentiator between this and all the other bazillion coffee mornings I’ve tried to use as a tool for transforming ourselves and society at large is that we start by reading some questions that Dougald wrote for his online course about Regrowing A Living Culture.

What does it mean to speak about a living culture?

What does doing this say about the ways of living that most of us grew up taking for granted around here lately?

What are the first moves of regrowing? The simple practices that we can start with in the places we find ourselves in now?

What are the daring moves that might be called for?  The places it might just be possible to intervene within the big systems of the world, as we have known it, to help create the conditions of possibility for presently unimaginable futures?

How do we find each other and stay sane and face the depth of the trouble the world is in without letting that just paralyze us?

They’re meant to set the scene, you don’t have to come with specific answers to these pacific questions. There is no homework.

There are announcements at 11am (unless I forget)

So this isn’t exactly the freewheelin’ online Tuttle that we did during lockdown. Or maybe it is and I don’t know shit. I want it to be different though. The in-person mornings have been different. I think they all probably need a bit of you in the mix. Sign up on Luma to get the Zoom details.

A wordpress.com notification that the site I made 16 years ago has finally made 100 views.

Actually that’s not quite accurate, this is the wordpress.com version of the site that I made to house the posterous archive after that went kaput.

So this is a) newer than 16 years; and b) not really a site that I’d expect anyone to look at, certainly not a measure of how interesting the project was or y’know, my value as a human being.

Made me go “unf!” all the same though.

I’m a dad. I don’t just mean that in the sense that I’ve recently acquired a new offspring, although that’s true. What the last three months have helped me see is how the role is integral to my sense of self. I feel much more me now we’ve got a baby. Weird. More to say about this, I’m sure. But also, regarding the FAQs – he’s lovely, very chilled except when he isn’t, yes we’re knackered, but it’s getting better and we’re lucky that neither of us are obliged to jump back into “work” immediately – the fourth trimester is a thing and I’m hugely grateful to have been able to make up my own rules about paternity leave.

I’m not a fan of war. At all. Being a dad again hasn’t changed that. I’m especially not a fan of wars that trample on the 80-year-old UN Charter. And I think it’s despicable to attack any country when the majority of it’s population are observing a religious festival. I’m aware that neither of these are unique to the present ugliness. Just ugh!

The cliché worry is “what are we doing bringing a child into a world like this?” Well, my first time around, the Soviet Union was collapsing and the IRA was regularly bombing mainland Britain. I was born the year after the Cuban missile crisis. My parents were born either side of World War II. My grandparents were babies and children during World War I. So I guess the answer is “What are we supposed to do? Wait until it all gets better?”

In the meantime I’m enjoying Russell’s current video output. It’s very varied and equally good when he’s chatting with others as well as when talking to camera. Something to aspire to.

I especially liked (re)hearing this story about missions and goals.

Which reminds me, Interesting 2026 is on May 20th at Conway Hall (natch) – I don’t think I’ll be able to go, evenings out aren’t really a thing at the moment. But you should.

That’s pretty much the line I used when I broke the news to the rest of my family, a few months ago, that I’m going to be a dad again.

Yeah.

So anyway, we’re now into week 38 and so that means the answer to the most frequently asked question is: “any day now, but next Friday, 12th at the latest”.

I know.

I’ve found it quite difficult to know when to make an announcement here. I put it on Facebook to friends only a couple of weeks ago. But last time I did this was 1993 so I’m not really up to date with the etiquette. And now I just want to avoid turning up here at Christmas saying “so this thing happened”!

We’re very happy and excited. I’d get a strong wife punch if I said it had been plain-sailing from the start, but all is going really well.

Excuse me, while I put this crib together…

Because I’m playing with feed readers, I subscribed to the Flickr feed for photos tagged with my name.  I thought I’d just subscribed to my photos, but I think I was also subscribed to new tags already.  Anyway.  A weird thing happens where I periodically get notifications of a few newly tagged photos, and sometimes I’m surprised to see that they’ve only just been tagged, because they are in a set with others that are all tagged too.  And I don’t think I have a way of checking whether it’s real (ie someone is actually paying attention to other people’s photos enough to be tagging me – which seems unlikely) or a “feature” of how Flickr construct the feed. 

Here’s an example:

(“putting the camp into GovCamp since 2012”)

PS I know I’m not the only Lloyd Davis in the world… as evidenced by my gmail.

It’s hard work being me, you know.

One of my favourite AA sayings is something like “people don’t fail at this programme because they’re too stupid, but some do fail because they’re too clever!” 

I find this “game of life” to be like that, whatever you’re playing at right now and whether it feels like it’s  finite or one of those infinite ones.  I think that lately, I mistook one particular infinite game I’ve been playing as finite. But then I’ve been drawn to say that there are no finite games, but you don’t learn that until one game you thought was finite comes to an end and here you are starting another one whether you like it or not. 

I’m on my way in for another Coffee Morning.  Whoever comes are the right people… etc.  Last month we heard at the beginning that they’d appointed Sarah Mullally to be Archbishop of Canterbury.  This week Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral election in NYC.  So a pattern is kind of emerging

It’s more that the reason all these things are called bookings is that once upon a time, the record of the thing it’s describing went into a book, an actual book – it might have been called a ledger or a diary or something, but it’s a description of a technology being used rather than the thing itself.  And that’s why trying to treat all bookings as if they were the same is as meaningless now as saying “I need to make a computering”.  If anyone needs an old man shouting at clouds, I’m available.

There’s a lot of cruft in that link to Dave’s newsletter above, which may or may not be tracking you or me in some way, but I didn’t have the patience to work out which bits I could cut out.

My dear departed pal from New Orleans, Ray Nichols, did an interesting thing when he retired.  He would describe his voluntary work as ‘interning’.  So basically he’d appoint himself as intern with an organisation or collective (it didn’t matter what) as a kind of joke, but also pointing to the fact that he wanted to keep on learning and stay slightly humble.  I’m not retiring, but I’m attracted to being a self-appointed intern in a number of contexts, making tea, helping out, observing and learning, but also sharing stuff that I know but that you wouldn’t necessarily fully employ me for.  As Ray would have undoubtedly remarked, “Just Sayin’!”  

I also think of LLM chatbots as fast, eager-to-please interns that you can mercilessly exploit without the usual consequences, but who might also make catastrophic errors if you give them too much agency. 

Poor old interns.

“Every day somebody’s born who’s never seen the Flintstones“

But seriously, it got me digging into when I first mentioned PKM on this blog.  And of course it was the very first post in September 2004 and then a couple of months later I went over to Amsterdam for KM Europe and took part in a PKM workshop hosted by Knowledge Board (so Ed Mitchell?) in a kind of open space form where I called a session on “trust vs suspicion, faith vs fear…aaaagh the feelings…” which definitely sounds like the sort of thing I would still do.

Ton Zijlstra was also there and he’s been one of my anchors for PKM thinking ever since, as well as being one of the stalwart bloggers who’ve kept my RSS reader alight through the quiet years (Thanks Ton!) and his post from the end of last year explaining how PKM is personal along three dimensions will form the basis of my response to my friends on that call, who are just embarking on the journey.

I don’t think I mentioned it here, but last week I completed the Couch to 5K programme again.  The goal is to be able to run for 30 mins or 5k three times a week and that’s what I did (30 mins but not quite 5k – I’ve never managed a 30 min 5k yet).  My plan from here is to keep building on that to get back to feeling comfortable running 5k again, no matter how slowly.  Today I did 3.6k and I’ll do that another two times in the next 7 days and then see whether I can stretch up to 4k.

It feels great to have re-established this rhythm.  When I first did it 7 years ago, it was straightforward for me to run every other day.  With the passing of time (and some accumulation of mass, especially on my waistline) just having one rest day between runs is pushing it.  Having two is ideal, I think, but three runs too much of a risk that I’ll fall out of the habit – three days off followed by a cold winter morning with torrential rain would too easily stretch to four and then…

I was encouraged though when I looked up how average pace declines with age, it’s not just that I’ve gotten out of shape, I’m also a few years older.  But it would be nice to be nearer the average pace for my age than I am at the moment.

The first time (maybe) we went there was Easter 1973.  It was quieter than Autumn half-term 2025, the parking wasn’t as expensive (or managed via CCTV) there was a little less erosion and there were fewer ice-cream sellers.  But we did have a picnic on the beach.

Andrea Vascellari got some video of me asking Tim O’Reilly a question about online/offline relationships.  In retrospect, there’s a lot of naivety and privilege in the air.

I noted:

the stories we’re telling are still more about technology than about what people are doing with other people.

plus ça change…

We watched Paradise and kinda wished we hadn’t. It’s a less hopeful picture of the near future and how we’d deal with an apocalyptic event than you’d usually expect on mainstream TV. I want my apocalyptic tales to end with a less realistic, but rousing affirmation of the strength of humans to stick together please. I’m holding out for season 2 to deliver, but won’t be surprised if it doesn’t.

The other stream that I take to when I need to calm down a bit is NASA’s HD Views from the International Space Station

Recent conversations about “the media”, reboots and regrowing cultures have had me looking back to the good old days of 2006 when I disclosed the contents of my “one-person media empire” bag and David Wilcox was starting to talk about “Social Reporting” – (btw the first link in that piece goes to one of David’s typepad sites, but “Thank Brewster!” it was captured by the Wayback Machine.)

In those days it appears it was all about the kit. The first iPhone was just around the corner. And now I carry all of that stuff *and* the software to edit and publish it around in my pocket every day. And so do you, probably. Utopian 2006 me would have imagined only a blossoming of enlightened civil society as a result. Silly Utopian 2006 me.

Something else happened in 2006 that seemed to offer hope for said blossoming and enlightenment. But the way it turned out makes that hope look appallingly naive. Twitter.

In that December I said:

If it’s quiet on this blog of late, the partial explanation is twitter.

It’s kinda diverting the energy that usually goes into blogging. It is a temporary diversion as I’ve also got some big posts to get out too, but they might come slowly over the festive season.

Dear reader, that “temporary diversion” ended up lasting another 10, 15, 20? years and one might argue that it actually broke what we were doing altogether. It takes practice and willpower to get back into writing in anything more than 140 character chunks (not solved when the limit got stretched to 280) especially when other parts of the ecosystem are working against you.

Dave Winer was pointing out how stuck we were with this stuff in 2014

Twitter says our posts don’t have titles, and can’t be longer than 140 chars. And Google Reader said our posts had to have titles, and could be unlimited in length.

This is why my world is fractured, and so is yours.

Now, I got a lot of good things done with a combo of Twitter (and Facebook/Instagram) and blogging in the intervening years – it wasn’t all gloomy. And I have friends who make a living now from people who pay them to write e-mails (and have Substack deal with the distribution details and some of the marketing. Oh and the payment processing) or make little films and let YouTube pass on some of their ad revenue.

You don’t have to be a wild conspiracy theorist or some sort of nostalgic Web 2.0 obsessive to recognise that giving that much power over your work to a third party owned by billionaires carries significant risk, especially given the way such billionaires have behaved in the past. But most people, me included, don’t then get farther than “Well, whatcha gonna do?”

I don’t have the whole answer yet, but I’m picking away at it here. I inwardly groan when my morning inbox is full of messages from group mailing lists that belong on a linkblog. Or I have to download an interesting-looking article from a friend on a WhatsApp group because it’s behind a paywall or some other barrier to reading it on the web.

Why is this? Why can’t I just accept that the media ecosystem is fractured and that I have to treat this kind of information in one way and that kind of information in another way, because that’s just the way it is.

You can’t expect the world to just organise itself according to your whims, Lloyd!

Well yes, partly it is my own idiosyncratic ways of organising my work and thinking and how I think about information and knowledge. But it’s also the understanding of why these tools get organised in such a way as to enable the exploitation of our collective labour by people who already have more money and power than they know what to do with.

I’m not making generic recommendations for the whole world. I’m thinking here in particular about some small-ish groups I’m in, that could imho accelerate and improve the thinking and activity and effectiveness of the group, if there weren’t these strangers in the room, intermediating between us as friends, and taking their cut at the same time, the owners and managers of these platforms.

We're gathering once a month and the meetings are confidential (I don't think we've even agreed on using the Chatham House rule) but I'm only going to share some of the things that came up for me, both in my prep (I'm medicated, I can now do prep! I read the chapter before the meeting!) and in the course of the gently- and gracefully-facilitated (by Liz Slade and Al Barrett) session.

I'd already tried reading this book a couple of times and then I also tried listening to the audiobook.  I've never got very far before.   So I'm grateful to have this group as an excuse to make perseverance more of a priority.  It's not just me, it is a difficult and challenging book, in the same way that I found my first reading of "Alcoholics Anonymous" difficult and challenging.  

The subtitle is: 

"Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism" 

Yikes!

and the publisher's bibliographical summary reads:

"A discussion on how we must face the multiple crises of modernity, interrupt and retire damaging modern behavior patterns, and reimagine how we learn, unlearn, and respond to crisis"

It's a lot.  

I will need more than one post to cover what went through me yesterday.  I had the familiar feeling of having my inner world rearranged both by reading and discussing with others. I dreamed weird dreams afterwards.

The first part (which we've covered in the first couple of sessions, while also gingerly getting to know each other) is about sixty pages and it lays the preparatory foundations for the rest.  It begins with a discussion of what, or rather, WHO "modernity" is and then invites you to "to witness and offer palliative care to modernity dying within and around you".

We focused yesterday on the third and final bit of "prep work" which clarified for me that this is about cleaning house (mostly within, but also without!).  One of the creative tensions that I expect to return to throughout is between the processes presented here of internal decluttering and composting and the processes that I'm familiar with from my step work in taking inventory, dropping the rock(s) and making amends.  I'm fairly sure from what I've seen already that they'll be complementary.

Without knowing the content, just before I sat down to read, I'd followed an urge to tidy my desk (if not the rest of the room around me). And then had to laugh at myself reading in the second paragraph: "Since modernity’s logic is one of accumulation, it conditions us to hoard stuff (both literally and metaphorically), thinking it might one day be relevant." 

Oof!  Is that what all this is?  An unconscious hoarding of stuff?  Certainly, if I were able to change my thinking about it's one-day-maybe relevance then I would walk away immediately.  I can imagine the lightness of doing so.  Immediately crushed by the grief and loss that I imagine would follow. And I'm not the worst at this kind of thing.  I've done some work.  I've let go of a lot. But there are things that follow me around, that haven't really been touched yet.

A lot of my physical stuff is important to me either because it's about me in the past or because it carries some feeling or meaning about people who aren't here any more.  When my dad died, you may remember, I wrote about the need I felt to gather up the things that might otherwise have disappeared with him.  Was that just modernity?  A trick, to distract myself from what's really going on in the world or the pain of losing someone so close? Maybe also the pain of being me (don't worry, I don't expect that it's any worse than the pain of being you!) and the difficulty of recovering from whatever shit went on in the past that wasn't possible to solve there and then.

I was very grateful, for example, to find my old school reports in my dad's stash, the contents of them really helped me understand and have a bit more compassion for the guy I've always been.  When I shared about that at the time, there were people around me who said "Now burn them!" but I wasn't ready to and I'm still not.  There's another stage in the process between where I am and "that's all gone" and I think it's something to do with transmuting, or in the language of this book, composting all these things that aren't needed in their current form, but which hold something precious that can support another cycle of life.

I've had an ongoing fantasy project that never gets anywhere.  You know, a bit beyond "someday/maybe".  A bit more like "when I've really got my shit together and am a much better, more enlightened and free person and don't have to sit around writing stupid e-mails and that". And it's about taking all of the books, tapes, records, pictures, files and shit and creating new things out of the precious emotional parts of them, new things that carry the essence of me and my ancestors for my descendants where it's useful, so that the non-precious physical parts of them can be reused or recycled.

I came away from last night's session with a little more hope that regardless of how unenlightened I feel, I might have permission to do more of that kind of thing now.

Anyway.

I agree with the thing about reading and writing in the same place –  I want it to be my (the writer's) place, not yet another centralising force who one day might be tempted to wall it all off.  Having a reader built in to the blogging tool was one of the features that I really liked in Radio Userland, back in the brief period that I used it.  I actually used it more for reading than writing due to my well-known shyness about talking in public…

The use cases I'm thinking of at the moment are for groups to blog and learn together.  So a collected feed from all the people in the group (although a curated set of feeds from outside would be a useful thing too).

I just tried to find my old Userland blog, but instead, Google just threw up this to distract me.  Somehow, in 2010, I was invited to take part in a couple of editions of BBC Radio 5 live's "On The Money" with Declan Curry.  My brief was to answer listener's questions on how to use social networking in business.  It was fun.  I got to sit in the Today studio then at TVC.  Many of the questions were basically "how do I use this magic social media thing to do magic and make my business really successful, tomorrow?" and I suspect my answers about there being no magic other than persistence and patience was what led to me not being asked back more than once.

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. 

Oh god! the cleaners are here! Hide!

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.

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. 

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. 

"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.

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!)

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.

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.

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.

The two threads I pulled on a bit yesterday are of course intertwined – the hope has to be that writing in public using your own voice and out in the open (with caveats for personal safety) is the antidote to the kind of horror that’s taken over lots of public discourse. 

I don’t have as much writing time today. I’ve still got lots to say, but I’ve got lunch with some old pals from GSA who I love dearly and wouldn’t miss it, but it carves out a chunk of my day and my attention.  It takes time for me to get going and then I need more time to actually get these words down and in the right order.  Part of rebooting this blog has to be more self-acceptance than I’ve had in the past.  I’ve been lucky this week to have had a few days of being able to give almost full attention to thinking and writing – and that has to be tempered with days like this where there’s more thinking than writing, with the thinking not having to be so deep, although it’s always going on. It’s just a log.  On the web. And some days the log contains evidence of much movement and others are less detailed.  That there’s anything at all is good progress.

Also, Laura just came in with a bit of chocolate brownie from Gail’s that she’d been given in compensation for them not being able to fill an order. She wanted to share the angelic miracle – it felt like there was zero flour, all sugar and butter, but in a really good way.  Like any angelic miracle, I suppose, it can’t be described in words, that’s what ineffable means, innit?  But now my mind is racing much faster than my fingers can deliver!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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).  

I have to apologise for the LinkedIn-esque final remarks, after a lifetime of thought-leadership and lessons-learned reviews, I just can’t help myself.

Investigations continue, I may have to remove this post later subject to legal action by the accused and her lawyer.