#the old reader

Jason Kottke has been one of our favorite bloggers for a long time. He started blogging at kottke.org back in 1998, about a year before the word was even coined. He’s been a consistent and inspiring figure to us at The Old Reader and we were thrilled to talk to him about the state of Internet publishing, how he stays engaged and inspired, and the future of blogging. 

When you wrote R.I.P. The Blog, 1997-2013, you were obviously engaging in a little hyperbole. What is the relevance of blogging today? How dead is it in 2018?

Yeah, just a little hyperbolic. Obviously many people still blog regularly, myself included, and new ones are coming online all the time. But the network has become smaller and less connected, I think. For better or worse, sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and the like offer easier and more powerful ways to share stories and information with friends and interested strangers. All the people using those platforms are performing bloggish acts...we just don't think of them that way. 

Has blogging been good for your mental health? Should more people do it, or are you somehow ideally suited to the medium?

Hmm. I can't speak for anyone else, but often I don't know what to think about something unless I write about it. And I love hypertext...linking to other sites and embedding images and video is still, more than 20 years on, such a powerful way to communicate ideas.

Whose writing gets you excited these days? How much reading do you do each day to find your topics?

I don't know that I could name specific writers, but several video creators come to mind. Evan Puschak of the Nerdwriter produces these great videos about movies, music, art, and other cultural creations. The team at Vox does great video work, but I will drop everything to watch anything new by Joss Fong. I'm still bummed the Every Frame a Painting team stopped doing their thing. The Primitive Technology videos contain no dialogue, just a single man building huts, weaponry, baskets, and tools from scratch in the Australian wilderness.

How do most of your good sources come to you? What's the best tool for cutting through the noise and finding what inspires you?

I use a lot of different things: Twitter, Facebook, newsletters, tips from readers. And RSS (see below). Twitter is often the most useful. 

It seems safe to say that social media and the news feed algorithms have had some serious failings as a content curation tool. Does the world need more of the personal curation found in blogs?

I mentioned Twitter above. I use Tweetbot as my Twitter client, which has two essential features for me: 1) the feed is strictly chronological, and 2) there's keywords filtering for the timeline & mentions. I use the filtering extensively...any mention of Trump or Pence or Bannon (and dozens of other terms) I just don't see. If I want to keep up on that sort of thing, I can go directly to a preferred news source. Mostly I follow people that I know on Twitter who share and retweet interesting information, much like a linkblog. 

How do more publishers survive? You and a few others seem to have made memberships work. What is the most sensible business model to make web publishing sustainable?

Membership is a good option for me, but I'm not sure about anyone else. Like, I really don't know. The main thing that I've learned is that it's good to diversify your revenue. Don't just rely on one thing...you never know if it'll suddenly dry up or something else will take off.

You've said that you stopped using RSS when Google Reader folded and lost touch with a lot of blogs. Obviously we've got an interest here, but what would get you interested in RSS again? Is there a role for it on the web?

I haven't stopped, but at most I look at it once a month to catch up with the sites I follow that are still updating (not many). Honestly, Facebook, Twitter, and Google (in the form of AMP) have figured out easier and faster ways for people to find content and for publishers to connect with and monetize readers. As we've seen recently, there are many problems with those platforms but RSS and newsreaders still have to compete with them.

When blogging was born, people talked about disintermediation and how blogs would be death of traditional media. Now the new hype is around decentralization (outside the social networks), sort of blockchain for electronic publishing. Do you buy any of the new hype?

If the publishing and reading interfaces are as easy and fast or easier and faster to use than centralized services, people will use them. For most people, reducing that friction is the most important factor. 

A lot of publishers put their faith in Facebook, but now the Facebook is suddenly taking news out of the newsfeed, they are scrambling for a new distribution model. How do publishers attract actual audiences without trusting their fate to social media distribution channels?

Well, I think you don't rely on Facebook. You can use Facebook, but when Facebook sends you 40 million people a month for 3 months, don't count on it in month four. Other companies don't care about your business except in the aggregate. A company as aggressive as Facebook -- move fast, break things! -- is not going to make decisions with your publication in mind.

Now that you are 40-something with kids and a blog, how do you stay curious and inspired? Do you see the same spirit that drove you to blog in any younger online publishers? 

The blog forces me to keep up to date on what's going on in the world and in culture, so that helps. I don't have the same energy or time that I did when I was younger, but I'm hopefully wiser and work smarter now, so it evens out, I think. And yeah, the youthful spirit is alive and well online, in places like YouTube, DIY, Instagram, and Soundcloud. Despite corporate influence and consolidation, the web remains a place where it's easy to try things out, to discover culture, and find yourself.

A little while back Jorel wrote a post introducing our new logo and design. We’ve rolled it out slowly on our blog and twitter accounts and some emails, but this weekend we’ll be pushing it out to our public website and within The Old Reader application. 

Most of the feedback has been really positive and for that we’re grateful. But as with any change, we’re sure there will be a bit of pushback. The important thing to know is that while some colors and the logo may be different, the interface remains largely unchanged.

There is one big exception to that which is our new reading view. This is one of the most exciting updates we’ve made in a while and it’s changed the way that I personally I use The Old Reader. It’s revolutionary only its simplicity, but it truly puts the focus on reading and has improved that experience for me dramatically. I use it constantly on my iPhone and have really enjoyed it weekend mornings with a cup of coffee in a nice chair.

It’s like old school Instagram in that the only view is most recent to oldest, although you can modify that by changing your sorting preference. Most of the other chrome is gone, you just read and swipe to move forward or backward. You can share, like, comment as usual but the really great thing is the format feature. It basically takes partial posts and brings them back in their entirety and formatted for the browser.  

As of this weekend it’ll be available for all premium subscribers in the Experiment’s section. We just want to get some initial feedback from this group and then we’ll be rolling to the entire community.

as part of confirming that everything is working, I wanted to see for myself that Feed Readers can access the feeds (i.e. my AWS setup doesn’t fumble their http requests), poll the feeds for updates, and will actually show those updates as they happen

I tried adding a couple feeds to my Feedly reader.....it would initially process each feed and show any entries that had been posted already. but it wouldn’t show new posts when the feeds were updated. even if I manually hit the feed’s Check For Updates / Refresh ↻ button

to see if the problem was on my end or Feedly’s, I made an account with a different feed reader service, The Old Reader, and added the same feeds there

turns out The Old Reader shows the new updates pretty soon after they happen. if a feed has been updated since the last time The Old Reader checked, clicking its refresh button will bring up the updates almost immediately: it polls the feed and updates what it shows me right away

checking the access logs confirmed it*: Feedly just barely ever polls my feeds, and manually telling it to check for updates does nothing. The Old Reader’s GET request shows up whenever I hit its refresh button, and pretty often even when I don’t

Feedly is presumably neglecting my feeds due to the combination of

(1) these personal feeds I’m generating only have one subscriber on Feedly (me), so it’s not efficient for Feedly to poll them often

(2) I don’t pay for Feedly, I just have a free account, so Feedly definitely doesn’t give them any priority

to be clear, Feedly and The Old Reader both have free and premium user tiers, and both of my accounts are free. it just turns out that non-paying Feedly accounts really penalize you if you want to follow any unpopular feeds

blegh. I’ve been using feedly for about a year and a half, its UI feels very comfortable to me now. 😿

(*I did spend a good chunk of time ruling out other possible sources of the problem. E.g. I made sure my site isn’t returning cached and outdated copies of the feed by adding no-cache and must-revalidate headers to any incoming requests for each feed. not the most likely explanation, but I wanted to rule it out)

Blaugust and Consolidating Your Blog Reading

Sure, one of the main aspects of Blaugust is getting people to start up or keep going with their blogs, writing, if not every day, at least more than usual.

Blaugust Reborn

But the reverse of that coin is reading blogs.  If we’re all busy writing more than usual we should all make some time to go read some of this extra output.

However, we as a group, and blogs in general, are a scattered bunch,…

Seth Godin has been one of the most influential people on the web for at least 20 years. In 1999, his book Permission Marketing redefined digital marketing. 17 books and 7,100-plus blog posts later, he remains one of the most thoughtful and interesting writers about how humans communicate and connect in the modern age. It’s especially impressive because he largely eschews social media and remains committed to blogging and book publishing. Though his blogging has gone from a superhuman five posts a day to a merely heroic once a day, he remains one of our favorite writers. We asked him about where inspiration comes from, how modern marketers have abused his ideas, and where the next Seth Godin might come from. 

For your April Fool’s joke this year on your blog, you pretended that you were out of ideas. That’s obviously not going to happen any time soon, but seriously, where do you get your inspiration- whose writing gets you excited these days? Who do you read to get your creative wheels turning? 

The joke was a terrible backfire. I fooled too many people, and I’ve thought a lot about why. I think it’s because folks think we need inspiration to be creative. I don’t believe that this is true. No one gets plumber’s block. They simply do plumbing. Creativity is work, it’s not the muse, or lightning or the result of burning incense. I write daily because I’m a professional, and this is what I do. Okay, so this is obviously a leading, self-interested question, but where does RSS fit into your life? How do you compare the RSS model to the way social media works? 

RSS is tragically overlooked. It’s an endaround to get past the giant companies that want to dominate your media life. It is snoop free, ad resistant and fast. It can’t be filtered or otherwise squeezed. RSS gave us podcasts, and it gave us a useful way to consume an endless series of blogs. I’m still angry at Google for building a trap that took the wind out of RSS’ sails. But Google has moved on, and the rest of us, if you care about information and freedom and access, you can go get an RSS reader. How have you resisted the pull of Twitter and Facebook? Would you advise other people to take the same non-engagement approach to social media? Can the rest of us really live without social media? 

If you use those services, at the very least, you’re the product. You’re being sold. And that’s okay, if you’re getting something out of them. What are you getting? Are you building an asset? Confronting useful fears? Making a difference for anyone? I spend zero time wondering if I should be spending time on social networks instead of doing my work. You’ve said that even if nobody read your blog, you would still blog every day. What is the value to the pure act of blogging?

Every day, I have to stand for something. Notice something. Put it down for all to see. The act is clarifying. It requires me to be a bit less of a hypocrite. And on a good day, it’s generous. That’s a pretty great combination. Has blogging been good for your mental health? Should more people do it, or are you somehow ideally suited to the medium?

Well, I have no control group… But I think given how much it helps others and how little it costs, it might be a great experiment. Do it for thirty days. If daily blogging doesn’t make your life better, I’ll give you a full refund on what you spent reading this!

It seems like an important moment for you was when you stopped worrying about your online reputation. Is that a precondition for people to be persistent in the face of failure in the contemporary world? 

Worrying is the key word. I haven’t stopped building trust, haven’t stopped contributing, haven’t stopped trying to push the envelope. I simply stopped worry, measuring and checking. My work got better instantly. So did my life.

You use the word privilege a lot- in fact it’s in the definition of permission marketing. Is there a sense that online marketers have been overlooking the privilege part of the equation? That too many are trying to capture audiences and not earning the privilege?  

Right! Humility is in short supply in the marketing world (did I mention I’m getting inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame in May? I’m practicing being non-humble to get ready for it…)

The thing is, we’re truly privileged. Someone taught us how to read. We’re healthy. Many of us grew up with people who believed in us. We live in a house. We have a wire that connects us to 2 billion people. Etc. etc. If you steal someone’s attention just to make a buck, I fear you’ve wasted all that’s been given to you. If you lie or hustle or scam because you’ve got a story in your head that you deserve it… what a waste. Empathy and humility are at the heart of successful marketing. We ignore that our peril.

What’s happened to the concept of permission marketing? What is your take on current online revenue models for publishers and platforms? I remember feeling so excited about the idea of permission marketing but I have a creeping feeling that there are too many selfish marketers dictating the agenda. 

Among brands and individuals that want to race to the bottom, it’s a footnote, easily ignored. They scam and hype and hustle. But among those that want to earn trust and make a difference, it remains the fundamental building block of connection.

How do more writers make a living? What is the most sensible business model to make web publishing sustainable? What practical advice would you give to a 20-something Seth Godin trying to make his name  today? 

To quote myself, “I’m still trying to be pretty good at being ‘this’ Seth Godin, so I wish people who want to be the next one a lot of luck. There’s never been a next Elvis Costello or a next Jill Sobule. There wasn’t even a next Chuck Berry or a next Charlie Chaplin … I think the most productive thing to do during times of change is to be your best self, not the best version of someone else.”

Can you make money writing articles or books? Not easily, not out on the long tail. The opportunity is to build yourself a niche, a place where you and you alone are the one to copy. Do you ever get the entrepreneurial itch? Will we see you starting a new company again? 

I learned a while ago that saying never is a good way to become a hypocrite.

Rec. #404: The Old Reader