Twenty

26 April 2025

This blog turned twenty years old last week, and I have a couple of things to say about that. I had planned to post on the day, but instead I took my children to an aeroplane museum on the west coast of France — we were already in France, just to be clear, we didn’t hop on an EasyJet just to scamper round a hanger of French military paraphernalia. Anyway, there are several things that 22-year-old me would have found surprising about that excuse.

Twenty years is a long time. The second post on this blog was that Adobe was buying Macromedia, which was a big deal at the time and now a distant footnote. The fourth was about the launch of Google Maps in the UK. This blog predates YouTube by about a week. A couple of months after I started blogging, I inadvertently live blogged the 7/7 London terror attacks.

When I started this blog, I was a freelance web designer mostly writing about tech and music. This blog helped me get a job at a record label, which, well, has led to a lot. A lot of those early posts were about Apple, and now that’s where I work, and I’m not saying it’s because of this blog, but I’m also not not saying that either. After writing for a while, I realised that one of the most productive ways of clarifying your thinking, and your opinion on something, is by having to tack it all together as something that makes sense to the reader. It forces you to solidify the difficult pieces of a problem that you can otherwise leave floating and amorphous.

It also seems like an interesting time again for blogging. Reading back on some of the earlier posts (excruciating as that may be), there’s a palpable sense of excitement for the future, for the possibilities that technology could unlock. That sense of technology for good is in a deeply uncertain place at the moment. But blogging, the very basic nature of self-publishing, creator ownership, and loosely bound community, is still powerful, still important, and the much-needed counterbalance to the enshittification of so many places where technology could be a force for good.

So, I’m going to keep on trying, keep on posting, keep on typing into that text field, and pushing submit. Maybe I’ll make it to another twenty years.

From: Articles

26 April 2025