Sharing and writing

I love having insights and I love writing and sharing them with people, and even though I do write my weekly Simplero newsletter, and a friends newsletter at a more irregular schedule, and I tweet a bit (though mostly links and instagram pictures), I realized that I have so much more to share that I rarely share.

I love sharing my insights with my wife, but I would love to share them with a wider audience. Yet, when it comes time to write my newsletters, I always have these voices in my head of "what should I write about" and "who cares" and "is that really worth bothering people about?".

I don't know if it's a coincidence, but I recently started reading Dave Winer again after a multi-year hiatus. If you don't know, Dave Winer is the father of blogging, RSS, and podcasting. Quite the innovator. What I'm going to do is start blogging more. When I get the insight, write it down on my blog. Then I might take it up and expand on it in a newsletter later. But put it on the blog first.

The blog is a great place for new thoughts, possibly unfinished, work-in-progress, fresh stuff. I often find that what feels so raw and fresh and alive and true in me right now, two days from now, I'm not exactly sure what the insight was. Doesn't mean it wasn't valuable. Just means the energy is no longer there, and so I won't be able to share it with the same aliveness that it had just then.

I'm going to do this as an experiment: Write more thoughts down while they're fresh, even if fragmented or don't seem earth-shattering, and we'll see where that leads.

I'm so grateful to Dave Winer for inventing blogging. It really is an awesome medium. It's interesting how the internet develops in waves. There was the initial excitement in the mid- to late 90s where we thought it was going to change the world, which, of course, it did, but not in the democratic way we thought. Rather, big government and big corporations figured out how to use it to retain even more control, and it turned out most people can't be bothered to really think or create for themselves, and would rather consume other people's thoughts and creativity.

In 2003 or so there was this feeling of a rebirth of the internet, after the dot-com crash. Basecamp and Rails, O'Reilly and Web 2.0, blogging, RSS, Metafilter and the MIT-based blog aggregator that I can't remember what was called. Then came the big corporations with Facebook and Twitter and it all got more closed down again.

It feels like we're on the cusp a new resurgence, and I like it.