I started blogging here precisely 25 years ago on 19 February 2000. I was 22 when I started and I am now 47.
My silver jubilee!
I felt when I started in February 2000 that I was coming to blogging late. I procrastinated about setting it up. People I knew were already doing it.
interconnected.org was the home for a web toy that was decently popular, so I choose a subdirectory (/home) and I’ve been here ever since.
It was a very social era and I was figuring out what my blog was for (we were all figuring it out).
So I would post 4 or 6 times a day, like most people. Just a line with a shower thought, or a link and a comment, or a response to someone else (I had a couple dozen sites I would pop open each morning).
It was before social media. It was before blog posts had titles, or even links: my posts got archived automatically onto a new long page each week.
That changed fast. Permalinks were invented in March 2000 and we started packaging up our words for easy consumption.
And so the structure of blogs developed symbiotically with Google’s growth with the PageRank algorithm. Google was in the ascendant. Blogs were perpetually fresh content, farming and ranking the web for them, but we also linked to each other all the time so we accidentally boosted “the blogosphere” at the same time as providing this work for search engines. I was the top “Matt” on Google for a long while.
It was also the era that the web itself was in the ascendant. Blogs and the New York Times were on a level playing field suddenly, all with an equivalent loudhailer. When 9/11 happened, forums, email lists and blogs were getting information out ahead of TV news or newspaper websites.
Podcasting was part of that great reinvention of media. I announced the first podcast from a national broadcaster (the BBC) right here on this blog in late 2004. Here’s the story (2024).
A group of us London bloggers would meet up and I remember the first time we filled the upstairs room at a pub. I looked around and thought: this is the future, right here.
It felt important. There we were, posting about our favourite snacks and simultaneously about the nature of this new social media (my circle included a bunch of theorists), and it seemed to matter.
So having a blog was this social thing but it was also small p political: it was participatory culture, it was hearing voices of people instead of the old establishment gatekeeping, we were part of something bigger.
I got my first two jobs via conversations started because of my blog, so it mattered personally too.
Gradually, blogs professionalised.
First “warblogs” then all kinds of specific topics and communities. Adsense and Amazon referral fees and SEO meant that blogs became publishing.
Not me.
Interconnected continued being my place to be social, share links, and put out ideas, all the way through 2007 and 2008.
Then, for personal reasons, I stopped.
I carried on with my blogging on the new company blog.
This was a time in which people paid attention to company blogs, and the new symbiosis was between blogs and Twitter.
I wrote the first ever “weeknote” in August 2009 and was part of a small community that figured out that genre. Here’s a pre-history of weeknotes I wrote a while back (2018). Weeknotes boomed and are going strong to this day.
Weeknotes were, for me, a special way to “think out loud”.
And… eventually I returned to Interconnected.
When I look at posts from 2011 to 2014, I can tell that I’d shifted to use my personal blog as a public notebook, rather than the old social stream of consciousness.
Posts still didn’t have titles. I was still mainly collecting and sharing links. But that thinking-through-writing style from weeknotes made its way to my personal blog.
That’s the style I have today.
2015 through 2019 was a third era for Interconnected.
The “public notebook” style dropped away. I was concentrating on work projects - some art, some micro businesses.
So I blogged because Interconnected is my public platform of sorts.
I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with that side of my blog. I do directly shill for work here, from time to time. Interconnected has a decent amount of people’s attention, wonderfully, and I can’t overlook that. But it feels like it contaminates my notebook somehow.
Anyway, that’s what blogging became for me, and this place. A place to publish, quite formally back then, tempered with occasional journal entries.
I think this would have been the long-term heat death future for Interconnected.
Except then 2020 happened.
I posted 16 times in 2018. 8 times in 2019.
In 2020: 94 thousand words over 116 posts.
2020 and the pandemic.
This is the fourth era of Interconnected and I’m still in it.
I realised pretty early that lockdown changed everything for me. I used to get exposure to new ideas and also paid work by meeting people for coffee.
And then… no coffee… so no ideas… and no projects.
I thought: lockdown disrupts my work pipeline. Everything starts with awareness. So be noisy about the precise things that I’m interested in, and see what happens. That means product design but also means nonsense about weird history or whatever.
(Here’s my philosophy about work pipelines and awareness (July 2020).)
To be noisy, I started posting a minimum 3 times a week. I went back to my “public notebook” style. I also had to overcome all kinds of psychological blockers to write that much. Here’s my philosophy about keeping a blogging streak (September 2020).
Key to that: I realised that I am a terrible judge of what posts other people will enjoy. Even now I can’t tell you. That understanding provides a great freedom.
Then I was still missing serendipity. So I opened my calendar for Unoffice Hours (September 2020). I still do this and I’m approaching my 400th call. It’s the highlight of my week.
If you search the web for ‘unoffice hours’ you’ll find a ton of people doing the same. I’m so delighted to see this format take off.
I’ve since tempered things to posting weekly. My practice now involves way more thinking-through-making which is where my time goes. (AI took me back to first principles on how to discover what to build just as lockdown took me back to first principles on how to find collaborators.)
My streak, begun in March 2020, continues: I’ve been posting here at least weekly for 256 consecutive weeks.
Plus, over time, I realised that keeping this open, interlinked notebook, accreted over the years, has its own value. Here’s my philosophy about archives and how to mine them (2021).
Am I achieving my secret agenda? Yes absolutely. I meet great people and swap new ideas. When I put ideas out there, such as with multiplayer and cursor party and Every webpage deserves to be a place (2024) then somehow fascinating projects find their way to me.
The fourth era of Interconnected!
My “voice” in this era is connected to how I see you, dear reader, my “other.”
You are interested and interesting. (Don’t get big headed about that, everyone is interesting. That’s axiomatic for Unoffice Hours. Frequently people don’t realise what makes them interesting because they’re so close to it. So it’s a game to discover it.)
You know a lot about something. BUT! It’s different from the something that I know a lot about.
So my voice for Interconnected, in this era, is to take something that I’ve thought about a lot, or thought about a little and done some thinking on, and then I tell another interested, smart person about why. Just… unpack it with the goal of explaining why I find it interesting. Sometimes I have to go a long way back to provide all the context for that explanation.
And I find that, by writing, new ideas come. Which is fun. So there’s personal utility too.
I’m less scared of attention than I used to be.
In the era of big blogs, I hated being linked to. It felt boundary violating; I didn’t want other people’s view getting all up in my ideas. (Then why publish so publicly? Well exactly, I was confused.)
Now I have know my “other” I enjoy it when a post gets popular. But I know better than to chase that feeling. Interconnected has to be my public notebook first and foremost, otherwise the words won’t come.
Meanwhile blogging has become small-p political again.
Slowly, slowly, the web was taken over by platforms. Your feeling of success is based on your platform’s algorithm, which may not have your interests at heart. Feeding your words to a platform is a vote for its values, whether you like it or not. And they roach-motel you by owning your audience, making you feel that it’s a good trade because you get “discovery.” (Though I know that chasing popularity is a fool’s dream.)
Writing a blog on your own site is a way to escape all of that. Plus your words build up over time. That’s unique. Nobody else values your words like you do.
Blogs are a backwater (the web itself is a backwater) but keeping one is a statement of how being online can work. Blogging as a kind of Amish performance of a better life.
Oh except that it does work as well as those other platforms, if that’s what you want, that’s the magic.
Also all the good people are here.
I evangelise blogging because it has been good to me.
I said this to Lu aka todepond who said about me:
I think he’s a hardcore blogger.
He told me he got into blogging in the “early days”. I didn’t know that was a thing. I didn’t know people were so ‘into’ blogging, or wikis. They didn’t seem like special things to me.
But maybe they are!
They are, they are!
My friends, my work, my ideas: I can trace so much back to writing here, at Interconnected.
Will I still be writing here in another 25 years?
Hell I don’t know if I’ll still be writing once my fourth era streak hits 5 years. That’s next month. Almost certainly I will. But…
I’ve learnt that eras don’t end or begin by my deliberate and self-begotten action. There are always causes and I can’t try to predict the what or when.
For now:
You should start a blog. Why? Because, well, haven’t I just been saying?
Thank you for being here, dear reader. I appreciate you. Whether you’ve been here from the beginning way back in the year 2000 or you’ve popped in just today or you’re reading from the future, this post buried in the archives, or anything between.
Please do raise a glass to Interconnected’s silver jubilee.
See you again soon.
I started blogging here precisely 25 years ago on 19 February 2000. I was 22 when I started and I am now 47.
My silver jubilee!
I felt when I started in February 2000 that I was coming to blogging late. I procrastinated about setting it up. People I knew were already doing it.
interconnected.org was the home for a web toy that was decently popular, so I choose a subdirectory (/home) and I’ve been here ever since.
It was a very social era and I was figuring out what my blog was for (we were all figuring it out).
So I would post 4 or 6 times a day, like most people. Just a line with a shower thought, or a link and a comment, or a response to someone else (I had a couple dozen sites I would pop open each morning).
It was before social media. It was before blog posts had titles, or even links: my posts got archived automatically onto a new long page each week.
That changed fast. Permalinks were invented in March 2000 and we started packaging up our words for easy consumption.
And so the structure of blogs developed symbiotically with Google’s growth with the PageRank algorithm. Google was in the ascendant. Blogs were perpetually fresh content, farming and ranking the web for them, but we also linked to each other all the time so we accidentally boosted “the blogosphere” at the same time as providing this work for search engines. I was the top “Matt” on Google for a long while.
It was also the era that the web itself was in the ascendant. Blogs and the New York Times were on a level playing field suddenly, all with an equivalent loudhailer. When 9/11 happened, forums, email lists and blogs were getting information out ahead of TV news or newspaper websites.
Podcasting was part of that great reinvention of media. I announced the first podcast from a national broadcaster (the BBC) right here on this blog in late 2004. Here’s the story (2024).
A group of us London bloggers would meet up and I remember the first time we filled the upstairs room at a pub. I looked around and thought: this is the future, right here.
It felt important. There we were, posting about our favourite snacks and simultaneously about the nature of this new social media (my circle included a bunch of theorists), and it seemed to matter.
So having a blog was this social thing but it was also small p political: it was participatory culture, it was hearing voices of people instead of the old establishment gatekeeping, we were part of something bigger.
I got my first two jobs via conversations started because of my blog, so it mattered personally too.
Gradually, blogs professionalised.
First “warblogs” then all kinds of specific topics and communities. Adsense and Amazon referral fees and SEO meant that blogs became publishing.
Not me.
Interconnected continued being my place to be social, share links, and put out ideas, all the way through 2007 and 2008.
Then, for personal reasons, I stopped.
I carried on with my blogging on the new company blog.
This was a time in which people paid attention to company blogs, and the new symbiosis was between blogs and Twitter.
I wrote the first ever “weeknote” in August 2009 and was part of a small community that figured out that genre. Here’s a pre-history of weeknotes I wrote a while back (2018). Weeknotes boomed and are going strong to this day.
Weeknotes were, for me, a special way to “think out loud”.
And… eventually I returned to Interconnected.
When I look at posts from 2011 to 2014, I can tell that I’d shifted to use my personal blog as a public notebook, rather than the old social stream of consciousness.
Posts still didn’t have titles. I was still mainly collecting and sharing links. But that thinking-through-writing style from weeknotes made its way to my personal blog.
That’s the style I have today.
2015 through 2019 was a third era for Interconnected.
The “public notebook” style dropped away. I was concentrating on work projects - some art, some micro businesses.
So I blogged because Interconnected is my public platform of sorts.
I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with that side of my blog. I do directly shill for work here, from time to time. Interconnected has a decent amount of people’s attention, wonderfully, and I can’t overlook that. But it feels like it contaminates my notebook somehow.
Anyway, that’s what blogging became for me, and this place. A place to publish, quite formally back then, tempered with occasional journal entries.
I think this would have been the long-term heat death future for Interconnected.
Except then 2020 happened.
I posted 16 times in 2018. 8 times in 2019.
In 2020: 94 thousand words over 116 posts.
2020 and the pandemic.
This is the fourth era of Interconnected and I’m still in it.
I realised pretty early that lockdown changed everything for me. I used to get exposure to new ideas and also paid work by meeting people for coffee.
And then… no coffee… so no ideas… and no projects.
I thought: lockdown disrupts my work pipeline. Everything starts with awareness. So be noisy about the precise things that I’m interested in, and see what happens. That means product design but also means nonsense about weird history or whatever.
(Here’s my philosophy about work pipelines and awareness (July 2020).)
To be noisy, I started posting a minimum 3 times a week. I went back to my “public notebook” style. I also had to overcome all kinds of psychological blockers to write that much. Here’s my philosophy about keeping a blogging streak (September 2020).
Key to that: I realised that I am a terrible judge of what posts other people will enjoy. Even now I can’t tell you. That understanding provides a great freedom.
Then I was still missing serendipity. So I opened my calendar for Unoffice Hours (September 2020). I still do this and I’m approaching my 400th call. It’s the highlight of my week.
If you search the web for ‘unoffice hours’ you’ll find a ton of people doing the same. I’m so delighted to see this format take off.
I’ve since tempered things to posting weekly. My practice now involves way more thinking-through-making which is where my time goes. (AI took me back to first principles on how to discover what to build just as lockdown took me back to first principles on how to find collaborators.)
My streak, begun in March 2020, continues: I’ve been posting here at least weekly for 256 consecutive weeks.
Plus, over time, I realised that keeping this open, interlinked notebook, accreted over the years, has its own value. Here’s my philosophy about archives and how to mine them (2021).
Am I achieving my secret agenda? Yes absolutely. I meet great people and swap new ideas. When I put ideas out there, such as with multiplayer and cursor party and Every webpage deserves to be a place (2024) then somehow fascinating projects find their way to me.
The fourth era of Interconnected!
My “voice” in this era is connected to how I see you, dear reader, my “other.”
You are interested and interesting. (Don’t get big headed about that, everyone is interesting. That’s axiomatic for Unoffice Hours. Frequently people don’t realise what makes them interesting because they’re so close to it. So it’s a game to discover it.)
You know a lot about something. BUT! It’s different from the something that I know a lot about.
So my voice for Interconnected, in this era, is to take something that I’ve thought about a lot, or thought about a little and done some thinking on, and then I tell another interested, smart person about why. Just… unpack it with the goal of explaining why I find it interesting. Sometimes I have to go a long way back to provide all the context for that explanation.
And I find that, by writing, new ideas come. Which is fun. So there’s personal utility too.
I’m less scared of attention than I used to be.
In the era of big blogs, I hated being linked to. It felt boundary violating; I didn’t want other people’s view getting all up in my ideas. (Then why publish so publicly? Well exactly, I was confused.)
Now I have know my “other” I enjoy it when a post gets popular. But I know better than to chase that feeling. Interconnected has to be my public notebook first and foremost, otherwise the words won’t come.
Meanwhile blogging has become small-p political again.
Slowly, slowly, the web was taken over by platforms. Your feeling of success is based on your platform’s algorithm, which may not have your interests at heart. Feeding your words to a platform is a vote for its values, whether you like it or not. And they roach-motel you by owning your audience, making you feel that it’s a good trade because you get “discovery.” (Though I know that chasing popularity is a fool’s dream.)
Writing a blog on your own site is a way to escape all of that. Plus your words build up over time. That’s unique. Nobody else values your words like you do.
Blogs are a backwater (the web itself is a backwater) but keeping one is a statement of how being online can work. Blogging as a kind of Amish performance of a better life.
Oh except that it does work as well as those other platforms, if that’s what you want, that’s the magic.
Also all the good people are here.
I evangelise blogging because it has been good to me.
I said this to Lu aka todepond who said about me:
They are, they are!
My friends, my work, my ideas: I can trace so much back to writing here, at Interconnected.
Will I still be writing here in another 25 years?
Hell I don’t know if I’ll still be writing once my fourth era streak hits 5 years. That’s next month. Almost certainly I will. But…
I’ve learnt that eras don’t end or begin by my deliberate and self-begotten action. There are always causes and I can’t try to predict the what or when.
For now:
You should start a blog. Why? Because, well, haven’t I just been saying?
Thank you for being here, dear reader. I appreciate you. Whether you’ve been here from the beginning way back in the year 2000 or you’ve popped in just today or you’re reading from the future, this post buried in the archives, or anything between.
Please do raise a glass to Interconnected’s silver jubilee.
See you again soon.