Telling people they’re doing it wrong is fun. In a webinar for Smartocto yesterday, as part of a panel of trend watchers, I suggested that the industry was thinking about #newsletters in the wrong way.
That prompted more questions than we could answer in the session — so I did so on my blog.
What were the five most read posts of 2024 on One Man & His Blog? They were all about the need for real, genuine audience work, the messy drama around WordPress, and a long-gone lads' mag.
Oh, and you can find out why a gender-critical philosopher irritated me, too.
I think that today I have comprehensively proven that a man my age should not attempt to understand Skibidi Toilet.
That is all.
Back to some work blogging, with a look back on the posts that caught people’s attention in 2024. The fall of Twitter, Facebook and the big digital news sites, and the rise of AI slop.
And… Shrimp Jesus?
Second-Hand Bookshops in Britain: 2024 Report — not great news, but not as bad as it could be. The secondhand bookshop world is changing.
Too many of us are trapped in a social media-generated bubble of synthetic citizenship, with activism and attention in the digital world substituting for actual civic engagement.
The work I do for NEXT Conference is relentlessly future-looking. But, once a year, we allow ourselves to look backwards. Lots of interest in where AI might go in 10 or 15 years. But also lots of interest in rehumanising tech, and escaping dark patterns.
The invitation of winter is to reconnect with the lost and wounded parts of yourself that hold the seeds of a new spring.
— From The Wilderness That Bears Your Name by James A. Pearson 📚
Started reading: The Wilderness That Bears Your Name by James A. Pearson 📚
