This week marks the 20th anniversary of this blog. I thought the best way to observe the milestone, and to try to pass along some of the benefits I’ve gained from keeping a presence online all these years, would be to share some of the most important...

At a time when millions are losing trust in the the web’s biggest sites, it’s worth revisiting the idea that the web was supposed to be made out of countless little sites. Here’s a look at the neglected technologies that were supposed to make it...

There’s been precious little documentation of the real cultural impact that the social web has had, particularly in its earliest years. So it’s exciting when people in academia who are researching those topics share their findings. I was sent a set...

This summer marked 15 years since I first started blogging here, and I’m happier than ever that I’ve chosen to live so much of my life in this place, with all of you. Nearly everything has changed for me since I began this blog, from major milestones...

We don’t do nearly enough to examine what it means when we perform common actions on our social networks. These aren’t just guttural, reflexive responses! They are actions with meaning, choices that signify something emotional and expressive, just as...

First, some disclaimers: I’m writing this as I sit a few feet away from Medium’s NYC team. (I even asked them for tech support while writing this!) Ev Williams, founder of Medium, is an old friend of mine, whom I became a fan of as I was the first...

Seven years ago, my wife Alaina Browne and I were living happily in San Francisco when she went off to NYC to visit with our friends and attend a party. By the time she flew back, we were on a path that not only led to our return to New York City,...

I lament the end of the personal CMS market; I was happy to back Ghost on Kickstarter today for the same reason that I back pretty much any effort at making blogging software — I think these tools matter. I find it interesting, and telling, that...

Congrats to Matt Mullenweg on ten years of blogging. I say it half-jokingly every time someone I know observes the decade anniversary of their blogging, but there really are key lessons about this medium that I didn’t figure out until I’d been doing...

First, a bit of background: Blogger, Google’s venerable and pioneering blogging service was created in 1999 by a small team at Pyra Labs, as an offshoot of the project management platform they’d originally set out to make. As one of the earliest...

At the beginning of this year, I wrote a piece called if you didn’t blog it, it didn’t happen, about how your thoughts, ideas and conversations need a place to live permanently over time if they’re going to inspire a useful discourse. And while...

Hmm, lots of interesting responses to If your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault, and even more interesting conversation about the topic of commenting culture in general. A few highlights from the last few days: My wonderful friend Caterina...

A few months ago, I introduced a blogroll on my site, making me probably the first person in more than half a decade to get excited about a blogroll. But my exuberance is based on the quality of the people listed there: I wholeheartedly endorse their...

By request, a bit of explanation of how and why I favorite things on the internet. (Or favor them. Or like them. Whatever.) First, where do I favorite? On Twitter, certainly: I love lots of tweets! On Facebook! That’s mostly for liking things outside...

It’s really gratifying to get to ruminate on things here on my blog and see echoes of those ideas the great work that other people do. Some recent bits of gratification: After talking about the open data from Health and Human Services as a “Health...

Great news for the web today, some of the smartest folks I know are doing what they do best: Making the web better. Take Paul Ford’s thoughts on “Why Wasn’t I Consulted?“, the driving inspiration behind much of what happens on the modern web. It was...

Clive Thompson’s newest Wired piece argues that the flow of short-form messages as we see on Twitter and Facebook is encouraging longer meditations in other media. I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon for a while in terms of the impact that it...

I love blogs. Nick Denton wrote over on Lifehacker about the pending redesign of Gawker’s blogs, with a lot of great insights into the leading edge of web publishing today. As with any thoughtful, provocative writing of such length, it inspired some...

Lots of nice writing out there that either replies to or references some recent posts here. Highlights: Dictatorship Versus Democracy in app store politics at Fast Company, by the always-genius Gina Trapani. A clear contrast between Mozilla and...

As ever, the best thing about blogging is the conversations it kicks off. Some nice responses to recent posts here and around the web: In a follow-up to Gourmet Live and Rewarding Experiences, Mathew Ingram of GigaOm ruminated a bit about magazine...

Some great responses to, and extensions of, the things I’ve been writing about lately In response to Forking Is A Feature, Rafe Colburn offers up The cultural implications of forking, rightly pointing out, “Linus Torvalds didn’t set out to change...

I stopped working at Six Apart over a year ago. At the time, I didn’t blog about it because the departure was completely amicable and I knew I wasn’t sure what I would be doing next, so I figured I’d step back and watch the company for the first time...

As I write this, the Twittersphere is going through its annual love/hate paroxysms about TED. Every year, the conference seems even more an event perfectly calibrated to inflame the bloggerati: Inarguably great presentations combined with...

I’m going to be offline for a little while (some would say that last rant of mine was a sign I should have gone offline a bit sooner) so I thought I’d leave you with some good sites to check out that you may not have been enjoying. Dan C’s Lost...

I don’t believe in life insurance. When I die, I want it to be a bad day for everybody. – Brad L. Graham, February 2002 My friend Brad L. Graham died unexpectedly last week, at only 41. It’s hard to sum up someone so loved in a few words, but I...

Pushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like...

As always, I am trying to be everywhere at once. Here’s where I’ve succeeded: Dan Costa at PC Magazine offers a look at the rise of micro social networks. I get a nod there, but it’s more satisfying to see the idea itself take off. That’s an idea...

Right now I am here, but soon I may be somewhere near you! Let’s see where I’ve been lately, and where I’m going to be: Across the internets, Choire asked a ridiculous question of mine to Wendy and Lisa when he interviewed them for the LA Times....

Last month marked the ninth anniversary of me starting this blog, more or less continuously updating since then. As I begin my tenth year here on dashes.com, I’ve made a few changes around the site. First and foremost, there’s a new look to the blog....

One of the most satisfying and fun things I’ve ever seen in my job was the sight of my friend and coworker Michael Sippey onstage with Steve Jobs and the Apple crew, showing off TypePad for iPhone. In our line of business, Apple keynotes are just...

Today’s Blog of the Year Picks: Ask the Wizard and Fortuitous. Between these two blogs, there have barely been twenty posts this year. Yet either one alone could be the best small-business (or small tech business) site of the year. Dick Costolo,...

Today’s Blog of the Year Picks: Some Bits: Nelson’s Weblog and RC3.org. These two are just for me, some real old-school-blogging nerd picks. Some Bits: Nelson’s Weblog is the work of Nelson Minar. Formerly of Google (where he helped pioneer their...

Today’s Blog of the Year Pick: Serious Eats. I love food, but I could never quite put my finger on what was wrong with the food blogs I’d tried to read until Serious Eats came along. As it turns out, I like cooking and I like learning about...

Today’s Blog of the Year Pick: Ill Doctrine. Put simply, Jay Smooth’s Ill Doctrine is the best video blog on the web. (At least the best one that’s in English.) As you’d expect from the founder of hiphopmusic.com, Ill Doc starts from a base of...

This week, I’ll be highlighting the sites that I think stood out this year. July marked the 8th anniversary of my blog, and over these past eight and a half years, my appreciation of what it takes to run a successful blog has really grown and...

It looks like I wasn’t the only one having a Gawker reckoning; A remarkable post revealed that both Emily Gould and Choire Sicha are leaving the site. (Thanks to Rex for the link.) That post impressively uses Carla Blumenkranz’s words about Gawker to...

From lolcats to goatse to the Zidane headbutt, I’ve been at least tenuously linked to some of the web’s most notable and notorious memes. Naturally, when I heard about ROFLCon, a conference being organized at Harvard to celebrate online memes and...

From Paul Ford’s “$5 Chocolate Bar“: Brooklyn has squandered the treasures she brought with her when she burst out of her father’s brain. She’s thinking, they took the fire from Prometheus and made ‘smores. And then–just a flicker out of the Gowanus...

Phew! A warm welcome to my regular readers, now that I’ve had the misfortune of being visited by the worst of the rest of the web’s audience. I should have known that writing anything even mildly critical of Apple, or anything that appeared to be a...

The Donors Choose Bloggers Challenge that I wrote about a few weeks ago is almost over, and that means you only have a few days to help support the Notes for Class Challenge, an effort to help fund music education programs that have been proposed by...

I added this thing to my site (the HTML version, which most of you never see) a while back, and it’s gotten some interesting responses. I’ll reproduce it here in a post for your convenience. del.icio.us Profile Digg Profile Dopplr Profile Facebook...

I’ve been doing a good bit of speaking lately, and have some more coming up, so let me share it with you if you’re interested. I was flattered to have my post about Gawker quoted in passing by Jim Romenesko while talking about Vanessa Grigoriadis....

Put these in your browser, and shake well. Facebook apps are not a long tail. So says Chris Anderson, who oughtta know. The tougher question is: Since the recent changes to app distribution on Facebook’s platform, will there ever be another popular...

I’ve had the chance to follow Gawker Media since before it launched, really, and so it’s been interesting to see a couple of items pop up recently about the direction of some of its titles and practices. The big story, of course, is New York...

I’ve seen a number of people make reference to Facebook’s application platform without knowing a lot of background about some historical examples that might be useful to learn from. So, since I remember a good bit of info about these things, I...

In his post this weekend, Rex Sorgatz points out that “mainstream media is hard”. It’s a truth I know firsthand — I used to work both in the music industry and at a newspaper, and still get the chance to work directly with the people at the largest...

I’ve gotten a lot of really good questions (and some fantastically generous donations!) about the Donors Choose blogger challenge I wrote about yesterday, but by far the most common is “what should I do?” There are a lot of options, so let me make it...

I’ve been a big fan of Donors Choose for some time. It’s a charity my readers may well have heard of, which helps students in public schools by letting regular folks like us directly fund the requests that teachers make for classroom essentials. I’m...

I get a little self-conscious about the fact that I’m so earnest on my blog sometimes, since I’m kind of a smart-ass in person. But I figure I’ll never regret putting myself out there, even if it’s stuff that I’d mock myself for, if somebody else...

I try not to ramble on too much about my work, except for a little “I love the people I work with!” post every few months, but I did want to point out one satisfying bit that I was enjoying today. You see, when you work with a team that makes great...

A Brief Message seems interesting: Essays about design, in 200 words or less. Khoi explains some of the thinking, and the idea of a new design for each update reminds me in a nice way of the late, lamented...

I’d intended to post a correction to this NY Times story’s recounting of the history of blog book tours, but was pleased to see that my friend, and intermittent blogger, Jason Kottke has already done the legwork. For my part, here’s Greg Knauss’ post...

Just wanted to leave myself a placeholder about the exceptional Gel Conference I attended today. Haven’t had a chance to write up my notes yet, (I’m so used to having wifi at conferences that I don’t even know how to take notes for myself without...