After it started raining I decided to redesign my blog. There wasn’t much reason other than looking for a fun project to work on and finding the old version increasingly tough on the eyes (plus terrible on the phone). The new version is simpler, responsive for mobile, and has bigger fonts (for whatever that’s worth).
I’d like to say this means I’m going to write more, but that doesn’t seem all that likely. I mean I’ll do my best (and have the last few days), but it’s amazing how often life gets in the way of blogging. One of the amazing things about RSS feeds and email subscriptions, though, is that it doesn’t really matter how frequently I actually update this thing because you’ll hear about it. For what it’s worth I’ve also got a Twitter feed for new posts from the blog at @NoahBrier.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is that it feels like there’s a big opportunity for blogs again. While everything has gotten shorter, it’s left a pretty wide door open for folks who want to write thoughtful stuff. I think it’s why we’ve seen thoughtful bloggers ascend quickly (someone like Horace at Asymco comes to mind). Again, not sure that means I’ll write more, but it certainly feels like a good time to be doing so.
July 14, 2013 // This post is about: blogging, design, redesign
So apparently Jonah Lehrer plagiarize himself (or something like that). I’ve read a bit about it (not enough to have an opinion), but of course Felix Salmon has and takes the opportunity to dive into a comment from Josh Levin at Slate that Lehrer’s Frontal Cortex blog (one of my favorites) is to blame. The argument, essentially, is that if you’re “an idea man” like Lehrer a blog places too much stress on content creation.
Felix, as is frequently the case, disagrees: “Lehrer shouldn’t shut down Frontal Cortex; he should simply change it to become a real blog. And if he does that, he’s likely to find that blogs in fact are wonderful tools for generating ideas, rather than being places where your precious store of ideas gets used up in record-quick time.” What’s more, he dives in on a few suggestions for what to do with the blog and in turn makes some really interesting comments about blogging generally. I especially like his first point:
Firstly, think of it as reading, rather than writing. Lehrer is a wide-ranging polymath: he is sent, and stumbles across, all manner of interesting things every day. Right now, I suspect, he files those things away somewhere and wonders whether one day he might be able to use them for another Big Idea piece. Make the blog the place where you file them away. Those posts can be much shorter than the things Lehrer’s writing right now: basically, just an excited “hey look at this”, with maybe a short description of why it’s interesting. It’s OK if the meat of what you’re blogging is elsewhere, rather than on your own blog. In fact, that’s kind of the whole point.
I always thought of this blog as a thing I use to think out loud. It doesn’t overwhelm me because it helps me think through ideas (and in turn create new ones).
June 20, 2012 // This post is about: blogging, Felix Salmon, ideas, Jonah Lehrer, Josh Levin, WRITING
Felix Salmon has a good rundown on how Elizabeth Spiers has succeeded at the New York Observer. I thought his summation of online content was especially interesting (and somewhat sad):
And so, in the proud tradition of good blogs everywhere, readers are left with a highly variable product. The great is rare; the dull quite common. But — and this is the genius of the online format — that doesn’t matter, not any more, and certainly not half as much as it used to. When you’re working online, more is more. If you have the cojones to throw up everything, more or less regardless of quality, you’ll be rewarded for it — even the bad posts get some traffic, and it’s impossible ex ante to know which posts are going to end up getting massive pageviews. The less you worry about quality control at the low end, the opportunities you get to print stories which will be shared or searched for or just hit some kind of nerve.
February 6, 2012 // This post is about: blogging, media, newspapers
Interesting piece from Mediaite on Buzzfeed Politics: “Buzzfeed’s coverage of the Presidential race is deliberately non-traditional, and likely wouldn’t work as well with an issue that couldn’t presume the same baseline of knowledge from its audience. Nor will it take long for other outlets to mimic what they’re doing; campaign coverage moves and evolves quickly. But Buzzfeed has a head start – smart reporters, savvy infrastructure.” I haven’t spent too much time there yet, but the concept certainly sounds different.
January 6, 2012 // This post is about: blogging, buzzfeed, politics
