blog-jim-nielsen-com-w2ugpt.txt (4299B)
1 [1]Jim Nielsen’s Blog [2]Archive [3]Subscribe [4]About 2 [5] Jim Nielsen’s Blog [6] 3 [7]Jim Nielsen’s Blog [8]Archive [9]Subscribe [10]About Preferences 4 Theme: This feature requires JavaScript as well as the default site fidelity 5 (see below). 6 Fidelity: 7 8 Controls the level of style and functionality of the site, a lower fidelity 9 meaning less bandwidth, battery, and CPU usage. [11]Learn more. 10 11 [12](*) Default [13]( ) Minimal [14]( ) Text-Only Update 12 Putting the “Person” in “Personal Website” 13 14 2024-10-02 15 16 The other day I saw a meme that went something like this: 17 18 Isn’t it crappy how basic human activities like singing, dancing, and making 19 art have been turned into skills instead of being recognized as behaviors? The 20 point of doing these things has become to get good at them. But they should be 21 recognized as things humans do innately, like how birds sing or bees make 22 hives. 23 24 I thought about that for a minute, then decided: making websites should be the 25 same! 26 27 The original vision for the web, according to Tim Berners-Lee, was to make it a 28 collaborate medium where everyone could read and write. 29 30 Social media sort of achieved this, but the incentives are off. And it’s not 31 just about ownership of the content you produce and who can monetize it, but 32 the context in which you produce it. Mandy nails this in her recent piece [16] 33 “Coming home”: 34 35 While one of the reasons oft declared for using POSSE is the ability to own 36 your content, I’m less interested in ownership than I am in context. 37 Writing on my own site has very different affordances: I’m not typing into 38 a little box, but writing in a text file. I’m not surrounded by other 39 people’s thinking, but located within my own body of work. As I played with 40 setting this up, I could immediately feel how that would change the kinds 41 of things I would say, and it felt good. Really good. Like putting on a 42 favorite t-shirt, or coming home to my solid, quiet house after a long time 43 away. 44 45 Yes! This is why I believe everyone could benefit from a personal website. Its 46 form encourages you to look inward, whereas every social platform on the 47 internet encourages you to look outward. 48 49 A personal website has affordances which encourage you to create something that 50 you couldn’t otherwise create anywhere else, like YouTube or Reddit or Facebook 51 or Twitter or even Mastodon. Why? Because the context of those environments is 52 outward looking. It’s not personal, but social. The medium shapes the message. 53 54 If I were to put this in terms of a [17]priority of constituencies, it would be 55 something like this: 56 57 • Personal website: personal over social. 58 • Social platform: social over personal. 59 60 Additionally, a personal website and a social platform are two different 61 environments: one I’ve cultivated, the other I’ve been granted. As Mandy puts 62 it: 63 64 [having a personal website] allowed me to cultivate the soil to suit my 65 purposes—rather than having to adapt my garden to the soil I was given 66 67 Like dancing or singing, you don’t have to be skilled to do them. Personal 68 websites should be the same. They’re for everyone. Like dancing and singing, 69 their expression can be as varied as every individual human. 70 71 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 72 73 Reply via: [18]Email :: [19]Mastodon :: [20]Twitter 74 75 76 References: 77 78 [1] https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/ 79 [2] https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/archive/ 80 [3] https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/feed 81 [4] https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/about/ 82 [5] https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/ 83 [6] https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/verified-personal-website/ 84 [7] https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/ 85 [8] https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/archive/ 86 [9] https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/feed 87 [10] https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/about/ 88 [11] https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/website-fidelity/ 89 [16] https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/coming-home 90 [17] https://adactio.com/journal/16811 91 [18] mailto:jimniels%[email protected]?subject=Re:%20blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/person-in-personal-website/ 92 [19] https://mastodon.social/@jimniels 93 [20] https://twitter.com/jimniels