MG Siegler:

This is my site. I choose not to have comments. I recognise that sometimes people feel the need to respond to what I write here, and I love that. Please do it on your own site. Or Twitter. Or Facebook. Or Google+. Or send me an email (actually, please don’t do that). Or any of the other hundred+ ways to communicate on the Internet.

It’s the getting of your own site that’s the deal breaker here. Which is why the larger platforms are winning out and the web seemingly being enveloped into the Twitter / Facebook / Google black hole.

Felix Salmon:

Reblogging, on Tumblr, is so easy that the vast majority of Tumblr sites actually create little or no original content: they just republish content from other people. That’s a wonderful thing, for two reasons. Firstly, it takes people who are shy about (or just not very good at) creating their own content, and gives them a great way to express themselves online. (As Arianna Huffington says, “self-expression is the new entertainment”.) And secondly, it acts as a natural amplifier for the people who do create original content – the average post on Tumblr gets reblogged nine times, and therefore reaches vastly more people than if it just sat on its original site waiting to be discovered by people visiting it directly.

There’s been a bit of chatter over the past few days about the death of the common web and the changing face of the ecosystem we call Internet. It’s all about fishing where the fish are. And unless you’ve built up a following over the last decade or have a bundle of startup cash (although that even isn’t a gaurantee these days) maybe it’s better to start on a platform that already has a large pond. As ugly as that might be.

Khoi Vinh:

Products like these are savvy enough to allow sufficient room for a user to live within them, to flex his or her muscles and breathe freely within the product’s architecture. They’re also the result of considerable iteration and improvisation, and sometimes they show that fact almost baldly in their patchwork agglomeration of mismatched features. No one would call them beautiful but they work phenomenally well and users love them.

And that’s all you really need.

Tim Carmody, on Kottke, about Kottke:

“And that’s it. It’s the five basic units that blogs were built on, distilled to their essence. And titles and comments are important, but Jason’s done without them both. They’re paratext. The real core is link, pull, response.”

Stephen Hargrove:

Along the way, I looked to Daring Fireball, Marco.org, and inessential.com for design and “how the hell do I do this” inspiration and instruction. Standing on the shoulders of giants, if you will.

I like the idea of “standing on the shoulders of giants” – wish I’d made that call – especially when it comes to embracing the quote and referral. John Gruber, Marco Arment, and Brent Simmons have definitely set a standard. I’m also leaning on Jason Kottke and Dan Frommer’s SplatF.

What I like about Frommer’s approach is how he’s used coloured headers to visually delineate “link posts” from his longer pieces of writing. In a way, the shorter hits are the Daring Fireball approach: grep article, process, agree and / or send them to the cleaners. But there needs to be commentary. Kottke uses the same method but the difference here, besides Gruber’s dogmatic verbals, is their linking methodology. Gruber (and Frommer in his shorter posts) link out, while Kottke links in. It really doesn’t matter to me that much but it has got me thinking. Only time (and my designer) will tell.

Martin Luther: the world’s first social media expert – The Economist

Wax on, wax off, comments on, comments off – Matt Gemmell

Matt Mullenweg fights for your right to publish independently – GigaOM

“You have to have skin in the game…” – Rolling Stone

Scene from a Toco Bell drive-thru – BusinessWeek

The Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers are not characters out of a Dr Seuss book – The New Yorker

T La Rock was Def Jam’s first rapper, until he forgot – Grantland

Matterhorn is what happens when you take to drawing in old coffee shops in Tokyo – Nieves

Matt Mullenweg:

I worry about the independent web. I worry about the content creators, and I worry that if 100 percent of the distribution of everything starts to go through just a few websites, that kills the vibrancy.

It gets better. It gets scarier.

As things like Facebook’s news feed become ever more ingrained in our lives, the knobs they turn are hugely influential. For a year now, I’ve said scripting is the new literacy. That’s something I strongly believe. In Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book, he talks about “program or be programmed.” That is, if you’re not in control of your inputs, you’re not really in control of your outputs either. You’re just a reactionary force.

Not only that but we’re signing over our content, our memories, perhaps never to get them back. At least as an independent publisher you’re in control of that. The thing is it still feels like an entry level blog or website is too much work. That and all the fish are in Facebook’s pond. For now.

When the scientist aliens crack open my note book they are going to have a field day with me. I’ve spent the better part of the last four days fretting over different coloured headings for posts and, while we’re on the subject of Dan Frommer, attribution activism and better living through referrals. There’s also the whole authorship thing that’s currently doing the rounds. Oh yeah and the fact that there’s absolutely no navigation on this site and it pretty much flicks from words to pictures over the weekend. But all this fretting is stopping me from doing what I actually set out to do: write. So to hell with it for the moment. I refuse to explain myself for now. Deal with it.

“It’s not about putting up pretty content, but about maximizing the value of the eyeballs in front of that content,” said Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group, a technology research firm. “There’s a real opportunity for him at Yahoo, if they can take all this data and use it for advertisers.”

I’m not much for punditry, not yet anyhow, but it’s lines like these that will drive me to it. This totally smells of the idea of a push into a Google / Facebook ad serving platform except Yahoo! is neither. Can we stop “maximising eyeballs” and actually think about what we want to be?

“That, she noted, is in contrast to Google, which aggregates content from around the Web and concentrates its investment in technology, but does not spend money to create media content itself.”

Except Yahoo! isn’t Google.

Yahoo! have already screwed Delicious and might just stick a fork in Flickr. Which would be a shame. There needs to be a balance between “maximising eyeballs”, investing (and believing) in technology products, and generating quality content. Or maybe not. If the beast has too many heads maybe it’s time to start slicing them off. Though this isn’t about the Lernaean Hydra, this is about quality responses. Which I may, or may not have, just delivered.

These are books I’m talking about. It’s not like I’m leaving home or anything.

I bought a Kindle about a month ago. On the advice of a friend, I decided to continue my ongoing dance of not purchasing an iPad in exchange for, instead of my iPhone, a larger reading area and the reclamation of much needed shelf space. (It’s off to the attic with the tree killing paperbacks I’ve collected over the years: sorry books.) The smaller-than-iPad screen I can probably deal with; the Japanese have been reading books and manga off their phones for the last decade. I won’t get into the weight issue either, other than to say my wrists are all the better for it. What gets me are the new pop-ups: notification after notification after, for the most part, self-gratifying notification. Try consuming a long read amongst all that shelling. And try not replying to that email, nor playing the next Scrabble move, nor liking that post. You can kind of see where I’m getting at here. I hope.

Instapaper works a treat on the device. I get an updated digest every night, there’s a lot less scrolling which allows me to focus on the writing, none of the aforementioned digital mosquito bites … it just works. It feels right. From bothersome website covered in advertising that I just ignore anyway to stripped back article that makes me think in one click and a cron job. That’s so good it’s almost perverse.

Thing is when I started reading a novel, IQ84 if you really want to know, a couple of things happened. First off I found what I thought was a typo, a sentence ending in an em dash. I got fixated on it for a while, reread the paragraph, then reread the page. My first thought was that there was something wrong with the file, the bits; this couldn’t happen in a printed book. But it can and it does, all the time. For a good couple of minutes the technology had failed me. I even emailed my aforementioned buddy to check his copy but then couldn’t find the typo so just let it go. Just like I always did when I came across a hardcopy mistake. The second quirk is the progress bar – percentages instead of page numbers – which I kind of like when reading essays but again bugs me when reading a novel. Again this isn’t a big deal; perhaps I’m missing the cool white flesh of the classic paperback with dog ears and oily stains and underlined sentences.

It’s good to be home.