Power On Self Test
by Gordon Weakliem
In 2002, I was working at Galileo International, which has since become part of Travelport, Inc. I was working on the Galileo Web Services project, which was a set of SOAP-based services that exposed the Galileo mainframes to the web. I heard that Chris Sells was running this Web Services DevCon in Beaverton, OR, so I got my employer to pay for the trip. It was a great little conference but the one thing that I didn’t expect was that I’d get interested in weblogs, because there were a number of people running tech weblogs who attended. I remember that Sam Ruby was there, as were Steve Loughran and Patrick Logan, and they were my entry into weblogs. A couple years later, I went over to NewsGator (now Sitrion) and spent a couple of years working on their aggregator, mostly competing with Bloglines. Then Twitter started, Facebook opened themselves up to people other than college students, and then Google dropped the big bomb with Google Reader. By 2009 I had 2 kids with a third on the way, I was knee-deep working at VRBO at a time when they were growing rapidly, I was self-hosting a home-cooked monstrosity of a blog engine, and I lost the energy and interest in blogging, both reading and writing.
I’ve kicked around the idea of running a weblog again in recent years, but I disliked the existing platforms like Medium and Substack and in the end I didn’t really have a good reason to write. But in the last 15 months or so, I’ve gotten really interested in AI, and I discovered that Simon Willison, another name I remember from the early 2000s blogosphere, was still out there cranking out incredible content. I read My Approach To Running a Link Blog and Simon got into his motivation:
Sharing interesting links with commentary is a low effort, high value way to contribute to internet life at large.
I realized that generally have around 75 open tabs because my tab management scheme is to open a tab for something that catches my eye or is recommended to me, and then the tab gets closed when I either get around to reading it or I admit to myself that I’m never going to read it.
I also love that Simon writes about what he’s working on, not a lot of pontificating, just talking about what he’s doing.
[Bruce Eckel]https://bruceeckel.github.io/) has experimented a lot with weblogs, and he seems to have landed on managing a static site using Github Pages. I alread had eighty-twenty.net parked at Github pages, so it seemed like the easiest way to do this, but I started thinking “what about comments?”, “what about referrers and stats?”, wondering about the utility of writing more content for training LLMs. Then I saw Cory Doctrow published Proud to be a Blockhead and he got into his own motivations
I started Pluralistic nearly five years ago, and from the outset, I was adamant that I wouldn't measure my success through quantitative measures. The canonical version of Pluralistic – the one that lives at pluralistic.net – has no metrics, no analytics, no logs, and no tracking. I don't know who visits the site. I don't know how many people visit the site. I don't know which posts are most popular, and which ones are the least popular. I can't know any of that.
That’s good enough for me.