Caili in wonderland

JASON KOTTKE ON THE NATURE OF BLOGS AND WRITING YOUR OWN WORLD BOOK ENCYCLOPEDIA

By: Jason Kottke
Wired, April 16, 2013

It all started with the World Book Encyclopedia. The complete set we had on the bottom shelf of the family bookcase was my first Internet. I still remember sitting on the sofa with my dad reading about the theory of relativity when I was 8.

Fast-forward to my early twenties. I dropped out of grad school after a semester because I’d fallen in love. My dad was a little alarmed when I moved back home to spend all day tying up the phone line with my new intimate friend, the World Wide Web, but I knew what I wanted to do with myself for the first time in my life: I wanted to be a web person! Whatever that was.

One of the first pages I ever visited in the fall of 1994 was the National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ “What’s New” page. Every time someone added a new homepage to the web, the NCSA would publish it on this page. In hindsight, that was the first blog—published reverse-chronologically, colloquial, and full of links. It was the family encyclopedia with velocity.

Within a few years, a self-identifying group of people called webloggers realized the power of that “What’s New” page, especially through the lens of a personal POV. I modeled kottke.org, the blog I’ve been publishing for 15 years, after sites like Michael Sippey’s Stating the Obvious, Jesse James Garrett’s infosift, and Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom. Those weblogs were idiosyncratic, about a little bit of everything, and sent people away to keep them coming back — a stark contrast to the late-’90s portal strategy of “stickiness.”

Kottke.org still does all of those things, which makes it a bit of a throwback. Funny to say that about new media, but if you look at other blogs, they are part of large networks (The Huffington Post), they cover narrow beats like startups or food that are amenable to advertising (TechCrunch), and they have a rotating cast of contributors (Gawker Media). By contrast, kottke.org is still written mostly in first person by me and ranges from essays on human extinction to videos of competitive wood planing in Japan.

A friend of mine says, “Nostalgia is death,” but I hope my approach is more than pining for the olden days of weblogs. Kottke.org is a way for me to relate to the world as a whole person, communicate with like minds, celebrate knowledge, and, yes, to write my own personal World Book.