Tilman

At the moment there are two initiatives running in the world of weblogs and blogging: Blaugust and 100 Days to Offload. They differ in the details. The first is about a month of posting, the other about a hundred posts in a year. But the aim is the same: to get people writing on their personal weblogs more. Quality is explicitly not the point. Neither is spell-checking, nor depth of thought. It is more important to just write.

Are we really looking for more people chatting away online? Without a clear aim or an eye for quality?

I think we are, yes — but that answer only works because the initiatives look for something different here. Nobody is claiming a hundred hasty posts beat one careful essay. What they are after is not quality, but to get more people to use their freedom to run their own website. Turning consumers into creators matters more today than ever, when the web seems taken over by commercial interests (and AI slop). And every writer has to practise, and write a lot of rubbish, before they get the chance to write something worthwhile.

The web is a vast place and has room for everybody. If nobody comes to visit and read what was written, no problem — by then the writing has already done its work.

It’s holiday time! Spend our first day in Milan. There might be more travel photography here in the next days. Or maybe not. Because I’m on holiday!