Notes from our writing session.
I think Iām closing in on my first draft of my blog post that Iāve been working on for a few weeks. It goes something like
On Blogging and Friendship / Blogging As A Knowing
Iāve always been a fan of blogs in whatever form they take. From the old-school Blogspot and WordPress sites of the early 2000s to the current new kid on the block, Substack, I enjoy them all. From renegade science blogs pushing the field forward outside institutional channels to homey (and slightly janky) recipe collections, I love them all. I appreciate the introspective pieces that feel like peeking into someoneās diary, and I have an enormous professional debt and deep gratitude for technical programming blogs.
Online writing is āfreeā in so many ways. It costs nothing to put words online and those words are also free to instantly teleport across the world. My friend was doing a computer science project for university once and for it he wrote a web crawler, a program that moves through the internet and looks for specific types of information. His particular webcrawler was pointed at wordpress.org because it hosts a lot of blogs. When he looked through what the scraper found, he came across as strange URL that seemed to be a jumble of random characters like aasijewqoknss.wordpress.org. It was so stranged that he was simply compelled to click on it. He then found some writing that he appreciated which then brought him to my website from which he contacted me on Twitter and so began our friendship.
I had used gibberish in the blogās URL to keep it obscure, as I was mostly writing āhot takesā to vent without expecting anyone to read it. But, of course, I still linked it back to my main page. The phrase āthatās the frailty of genius; it needs an audienceā comes to mind. Not that Iām claiming to be a genius, but thereās always a bit of ego involved when putting your thoughts into the public domain. Iād also add that the web itself, along with whoever might be out there, acts like a void or vacuum, pulling out different parts of us. It demands something from us. The artist needs an audience, and even the implied audience of the web is enough to bring out the artist in each of us.
Thereās an intimacy Iāve been able to feel when reading blogs, especially those of my friends or soon-to-be-friends. While we can always write to authors, thereās something about blogs already being online that makes the further online communication that much more accessible. I became friends with Alex by reading her blog on how it was to live in Berlin and then a comparison between Porto and Lisbon. She even took me for a little tour when I visited once. Of course, the point of the essays were to describe places but it was the way in she described them that made me feel that we could be friends.
I started this piece as an idea to do a āLove letter to bloggingā but it became a bit unwieldy and many other topics started branching off like:
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the ephemeral nature of the internet
- Blogs as internet artifacts are also interesting. They exist everywhere and nowhere. Anyone in the world can access these words but at the same time it can be removed immediately too. An ephemera.
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the aesthetics of blogs
- Thereās an aesthetic element to blogs too, no two are the same. Itās like someneās living room. Why did they choose that font, that background, this layout. I find even domains interesting! Itās like someoneās little kingdom. Their corner of the internet.
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blogs as institutions
- Iām always in awe of those blogs that have become something akin to institutions: The Technium by Kevin Kelly, gwern.net, The Marginalian (formally Brainpickings) - theyāre just legendary places where I often make pilgrimages to.
Instead of cramming these ideas into one post, Iām going to let them grow into their own pieces over time.
Iām also writing at
This sessionās big takeaway for me was ālow stakes, high volumeā ā will be implementing this myself.
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