The site has been refreshed to a more traditional blog layout that exposes a bit more content. I like the idea of a super-minimalist site that focuses entirely on the writing on the page, but I have nearly 500 posts, many that are still valuable as part of this interconnected web of thinking I call My Blog. Hopefully this new layout will help readers discover that value.
That is the past. What about the future?
There is now a newsletter! Seeing as I only write about twice a month, this is obviously not a destination site. RSS and Twitter probably shouldn’t be relied upon as the sole channels for distribution, so I’ve decided to fall back on trusty old electronic mail and publish a “monthly-ish” newsletter to keep you up to date. Take a look at the first edition and please sign up.
Addendum: Controlling information velocity
Content distribution online is fractured (Facebook notwithstanding). Readers use different channels to limit the flow of information, and control how and when their attention is spent.
Not every update deserves to be a push notification on your phone. And checking every single website every hour of every day for updates is impractical. RSS is great for pulling new information to the reader as it was published, but it seems to be used less and less. Social is a much more casual way of consuming information since you access it when you want, but risk missing things as the stream flows by. Being a social media completionist is hard work! For Twitter I maintain a number of lists, from a small number of accounts that I never want to miss, to a wider net for those long waits at the bank, all the way out to my entire list of Follows.
If you want to get the whole picture, but in a digest form that is not in your face, email newsletters are a great solution. Rather than an urgent notification of something happening now, email newsletters are a gentle reminder that something happened in the recent past. For many types of information, this is a comfortable velocity. It is the convenience of not having little chunks of your attention stripped away daily. I think it is key to the email newsletter resurgence in the past few years.
Publishers would do well to consider what rate their readers would like their content, and offer choices based on “information velocity” rather than merely publishing to every platform at every moment just to be there.
