Why I Migrated My Newsletter From Substack to Eleventy and Buttondown

Cybercultural on Eleventy, Jan 2024

Today I’ve gone live with a new website and email newsletter platform for Cybercultural, my tech history newsletter that I started on Substack in 2019. What pushed me to migrate off Substack is its stance on hate content, which I personally object to. But over the past several months, I’ve also been pondering how to … Read more

My New Book: Bubble Blog, a Personal Memoir of Web 2.0

Bubble Blog book

I’m excited to launch a project I’ve been working on for over a year now: a book called Bubble Blog: From Outsider to Insider in Silicon Valley’s Web 2.0 Revolution. I will be serializing the book on my newsletter, starting this week, and it will also be released as a paperback in early 2024. The first … Read more

First Blog Post in 2023

time

I’m back! Blogging, that is. A quick note about how you can follow this blog on Mastodon, and about the upcoming serialization of my Web 2.0 memoir.

The state of serverless

I’ve just finished a series of five columns for The New Stack about the serverless trend in cloud computing. It’s a terrible name, but basically serverless means removing all the backend burden for developers. No need to worry about infrastructure or servers, you just pay a platform like AWS Lambda to run everything — you … Read more

What’s exciting me on the cloud native internet

For the past few months, I’ve been writing a weekly tech column for The New Stack. The theme of the column is what’s next on the cloud native internet. It’s an update on my long-time blogging theme, what’s next on the web; which was also ReadWriteWeb’s mission statement. The term “cloud native” is how most … Read more

The value of online writing today

I’ve been thinking lately about what value long-form writing has in the current internet era, which is dominated by a combination of video (e.g. YouTube), images (e.g. Instagram), ‘in the moment’ multimedia (e.g. Snapchat, TikTok) and the black and white opinions prevalent on social media (e.g. Twitter, Facebook). There are two key aspects of the … Read more

Writers are builders too

A writer’s role is to build something thoughtful and/or delightful that is of value to people. It should help readers do their jobs, or help them understand the world, or help them cope with the world (by providing entertainment or comfort). Would that qualify as a “builder” in Marc Andreessen’s eyes?

Re-connecting

I’ve been working at The New Stack for five weeks now, and am enjoying it more than any other job I’ve had since ReadWriteWeb. A big part of that is due to the team of people I’m working with, who have been generous with their time and knowledge, and welcoming. But I’m also feeling energized … Read more

Hunkering down

Life in a time of pandemic, and updates about my new job and the status of my writing projects.

Internet amnesia: Clive James & his website

Clive James

The writer and cultural critic Clive James died last November, at the age of 80. His website, clivejames.com, lives on. James viewed his website as a way to preserve his work, and even in a sense live forever. What he didn’t realise is that the Web forgets the past all too easily, and sometimes erases it entirely.

The internet’s impact on culture

The advent of streaming, from Spotify and others, was the first sign that the internet might no longer be just a distribution channel for music. In fact, Spotify ended up fundamentally changing how we consume music.