Tilman

I started a new section on this site: A collection of my academic design research: tilman.me/pub^* Google Scholar, here I come!

Knot, our little microblogging system, can now crosspost to Bluesky and Mastodon. I admit this is more news for me than for anybody else — but in the long run you can expect more quality content from my side on these platforms!

Another step towards a more solid POSSE strategy: post to my own site first, then syndicate as well as possible to where the audience still lingers. Testing it in real life conditions now. If that holds up, it goes into the Knot repo next week.

Every year tinyawards.net^* hand out a prize for the best of the small, poetic, handmade web — personal projects, built by one or two people, far away from commercial mainstream. The public nominates, a selection committee picks a shortlist, and then the public votes.

If you want to see what's possible on the web if you have some time, some dev skills and a huge amount of daring creativity, look here!

Eleven sites are on this year's shortlist, and voting is open until September 25th. Go click! tinyawards.net^*

Jim Mitchell's IndieWeb Is Punk Manifesto: eight theses reading the personal site as DIY culture. I hope new perspectives like this can help getting new audiences interested in independent web publishing!

indiewebispunk.net^*

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.