P&B: Matt Webb

This is the 84th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Matt Webb and his blog, interconnected.org

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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

I’m Matt. I live in London and grew up on the south coast of the UK in a place called the New Forest. The gag is that it’s not new - it’s 900 years old - and it’s not a forest. When it was founded they chopped all the trees down to hunt deer.

I guess I work in design and technology? I help big companies and new ones have new ideas and bring them to market via my one person studio Acts Not Facts. Previously I co-founded a design consultancy called BERG and then ran a couple of startup accelerators with R/GA Ventures, and a ten thousand years ago co-authored a pop neuroscience book called Mind Hacks.

I’m currently manufacturing a clock that tells the time with a new poem every minute! I made an app that points the way to the centre of the galaxy!

So yeah I am super easily distracted with side projects. I like running (when I’m not injured) and I write a whole bunch.

My blog is called Interconnected and I’ve been blogging there for a little over 25 years.

What's the story behind your blog?

February 2000. That’s when I started. Though I felt like I was late to the game. Which is... wow. So wrong.

I used to make web toys. Nothing wild by today’s standards but I made this six degrees game called Dirk that anyone could add to. A Douglas Adams reference of course! The strap line was something about exploring the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.

And it got a little bit popular and somebody suggested I should get a domain for it, so I got interconnected.org. That was in 99 I guess?

Then blogger.com got popular and everyone starting blogging. And I prevaricated for a bit because I wanted to roll my own tech to do it, but in the end I started a blog and I needed somewhere to put it so I put it at interconnected.org/home and I’ve been there ever since.

What’s it like to write in the same place for 25 years? I blogged some thoughts on that if you want the blow by blow.

But I will say that, right there at the beginning, it felt transgressive and powerful that it was so easy to publish words and make a little home online. Once upon a time I used to make fanzines and that meant somehow begging access to a photocopier and somehow putting down money to print copies to sell. My eyes were wide when I discovered the web. (And then View Source.)

Like, our little blogs are on the same playing field as the New York Times! That’s what the web meant to me.

Blogging is small-p political again, today. It’s come back round. It’s a statement to put your words in a place where they are not subject to someone else’s algorithm telling you what success looks like; when you blog, your words are not a vote for the values of someone else’s platform.

Even without all of that, blogging has been good to me. We used to meet up, us early bloggers in London, and many of my friends today are friends I made in those early days. And my blog is how I’ve gotten jobs. And new ideas.

Now Interconnected is my public notebook. I think through ideas by writing so it’s part of my practice. I’ve posted something at least weekly for almost 5 years which is a neat milestone. I keep track of that particular streak in the site footer.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Ideas can happen anytime. The thing is to capture them. So I have a folder in a notes app and I’ll tap, tap, tap with my thumbs walking down the street.

Right now I use iA Writer for all my writing. I used Ulysses for many years and I still love it. But I’m trying something different because I have a million words in this app, all my private notes, and I care a lot about longevity i.e. always having access to my data. So, in choosing a notes app, I index on “big folder of Markdown files.”

I browse the ideas list and usually a couple combine and then I turn that into a rough outline. A good time to do that is on the train, or before dinner. I always need to know where to start a post. Then I start writing and never end up where I thought I would.

I do a quick edit before posting. My priority is to publish so I made a list of the mental blocks I create for myself and I work to avoid them. I’m not too diligent, by design. Lots of typos.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

A friend once sent me this poem by Charles Bukowski, air and light and time and space.

no baby, if you're going to create
you're going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or

(And so on.)

Now I’m no poet (or maybe I am, given the clock I’m making) but I feel the same.

That said if I’m working on a more deliberate essay, or maybe a talk or some client work, I’ll open a bunch of tabs and pull a handful of books from the shelves and put them on the desk next to me, and I don’t look at them but somehow they help. This is a legit psychological thing apparently. I asked a friend about it a few years ago and he said “you gotta prime the latent conceptual space your thoughts move around.”

So that’s what I’m doing, priming the conceptual etc.

ALTHOUGH.

Like I said, everything starts with ideas.

I wouldn’t be able to blog at all if I weren’t writing down ideas.

And the ideas seem to come most when I’m doing something else: walking out to get a sandwich at lunch, going to a gallery, reading a book about something I don’t know anything about, listening to In Our Time (I listen to a lot of In Our Time)...

Typing it, right now, I realise I should prioritise more time and space for those activities. Huh. I should give them more air and light.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

Right at the bottom of my blog, right at the bottom of the footer, the last line, there’s a link to the colophon. You’ll find the whole tech stack there.

Because it’s pretty baroque.

I prioritise three things:

All of which takes me to building everything myself. Each post is a Markdown file, and the site is rendered by a small Python app. It’s not quite a static site. I layer co-presence on top which is written in another technology entirely.

And oh my goodness I would not recommend this setup to anyone, not a bit, but it works very well for me.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

If I were to start a blog today, I would start an email newsletter. And that would be a mistake.

I lucked into a situation where my words accumulate over time like a personal Memex and I have a small and amazing readership -- seriously, whenever I ask something, whether it’s about something esoteric or even a personal favour, people are so informed and so generous.

I close the loop by running something called Unoffice Hours. I don’t have comments on the blog but I do have a few open calendar slots each week, so I’ve had almost 400 calls over the past few years with readers or people who have otherwise stumbled across Interconnected.

And it all works so well for me, you know?

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I don’t make any money out of Interconnected, not directly. But it’s so, so worth it. I don’t how how to put a figure on the value of friends, work, ideas, opportunities and enjoyment I’ve got out of simply “thinking out loud” over the years.

How much does it cost to run? I don’t know if I could quantify that. I pay for a server at Digital Ocean, analytics by Fathom, and email (all posts also go out by email) with Buttondown. But if were to track my time making notes for posts or actually writing them, haha no way, I dread to think.

People should totally make money from their personal blogs if they want to and they can. This arrangement works super well for me.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

It’s so hard to recommend blogs without knowing a person! Here are 10 I picked a couple years ago (not all are still going but that’s what archives are for).

There are two people I’d be so keen to hear from.

Darren Shrubsole blogs at LinkMachineGo, which I love. We’re a similar vintage: we’re both London bloggers and he also just hit his blogging silver jubilee. So, how do our experiences overlap? How do they differ?

Lu a.k.a. todepond blogs in a wiki? Blog? Digital garden? Something. They are maybe a year or so into blogging with a combination of insightful-and-getting-the-big-traffic posts and beautiful, personal posts too. Lu isn’t “blogging,” they’re doing their own thing, and it’s electric and done with such clear-sighted self-knowledge, and such ease.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

I think I should probably shut up now.

Anyway.

This was the 84th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Matt. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.

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