I clicked on a link to a 2014 post by Matt Mullenweg titled “Why the Web Still Matters for Writing” after I scanned through another recent post and I thought I’d reshare it here:
I especially like this quote:
But the web is like water: it fills in all the gaps between things like gaming and social with exactly what any one particular user wants. And while we all might have a use for Facebook – simply because everyone is there – we all have different things that interest us when it comes to reading.
I have this recurring thought that the Web is a wonderful platform for writing and publishing and, if we weren’t all so caught up in various models of control, we may be more open to publishing more stuff to the Web, natively. It just makes so much sense to me as an open and flexible platform (and one of the motivations for my newest project). It’s also why I love the idea of authors publishing books online as well as in the usual digital and print formats.
A great example of an author who has done this (and possibly for similar reasons) is Jeff Jarvis who decided to publish his latest book, Geeks Bearing Gifts, on Medium in stages.
While I’m on this topic, here is another gem I found on Mullenweg’s blog titled “On Syndication and Rolling Your Own“. It goes all the way back to 2003, those early days of blogging:
Remember that this was before Facebook, Twitter and much of the social Web we have today. It was also a couple months before WordPress was first released.
Image credit: Foundry from Pixabay, released under a CC0 Dedication