Tuesday, 30th September 2025

Stephanie Booth has written a really useful three-part series on "Rebooting The Blogosphere" (activities | interaction | integration) – check it out.  

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).