Thank you for the shoutout, Dave Winer!
Blog
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Om Malik has started a daily blog section. He is using WordLand to write there. Here is the announcement post for more details.
Unlike him, my posts are interspersed with the other blog posts. You can identify posts written in WordLand by using the Status Updates category.
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Weekly Notes 11/2025
I have slowed down the rate at which I am consuming content this week. I have also reduced the sources from which I am consuming my content to feeds I have subscribed to.
I fell into a spirituality rabbit hole with questions about Narasimha, kula devatas, and various practices performed in Kerala in the past. I fell into another rabbit hole about blogrolls and libraries.
I also wrote the first in what I hope to be a weekly post on LinkedIn about technical writing.
All this writing means I have not got any reading done other than my RSS feeds and a few Substack posts. I have not been able to follow space news since almost the beginning of February now.
The recoverey after surgery seems to be going alright.
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Om Malik writes on his blog, On my Om:
When I went to see the Manila Pen Show’s website, every single one of the exhibitors was linked not to their website but to Instagram. These included some of the more traditional and sedate pen-makers from Japan. Earlier this morning, when reading Die Workwear’s piece about shirts, I realized that almost all the bespoke shirt makers, shoemakers, and others announce their trunk shows and new products on Instagram. And so do others who have something to say, sell, or shill.
That is when it hit me — Instagram has gone from being “a photography community” to being a “visual information network.”
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Doc Searls says we must return to calling the web, the Web.
Same goes for The Internet. And The Net. The Web is the Web, not “the web”. We—the writers of the networked world—gave something up when we allowed the bishops of the AP and the Chicago Manual of Style to demote the Web from proper noun to lower-case status, down there with television and radio. Nobody invented “the television,” or “the radio.” Not even “the newspaper.” But somebody—Sir Tim Berners-Lee—invented the World Wide Web. With upper case letters. The WWW was not the www. Is it too late to bring the Web back as a proper noun? I don’t know. I do know that I’m never going to demote it in my own writing.
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Clicking a link rabbit hole
Manu spoke to James for his People and Blogs (P&B) series. This is one of the branches that I clicked through that went down a pretty interesting rabbit hole.
One of the reasons I wanted to read James’ blog after reading the interview was because he is a technical writer, just like me. I loved his blogroll, called Wander. There were many pages that I loved wandering around on.
Another implementation of a blogroll that this reminded me about was the one on Doc Searls’ blog. This dynamic blogroll on his blog’s right side bar is built by Dave Winer and uses some OPML magic.
The Library Movement
One of the blogs I found on James’ Wander page was Marisabel’s Konfetti Explorations. One of the recent blog post entries was about the 5 Laws of Library Science, formulated by S R Ranganathan.
When I searched to learn more about Ranganathan, who I had heard about earlier in various contexts, I learnt that he was one of the founders of the Madras Library Association, founded in 1928.
I was looking for other library associations that may have been active in India. I found that the Kerala Library Association was started quite late in 1972. The association is credited as one of the reasons for Kerala having one of the highest literacy rates in India.
Puthuvayil Narayana Panicker, known as the father of the library and literacy movement in Kerala, is credited with establishing libraries across the state in the 1990s.
I was surprised to learn that Maharashtra is one of the earliest such associations to be formed, founded in 1921.
There is also an Indian Library Association, formed in 1933. Looking at the website tells you that the organisation prioritizes the people running the organization and not the libraries or the library movement in India.
As a counterpoint, look at the website of the Free Libraries Network. They are running a fundraiser that ends tomorrow which offers various Indian authors offering services in return for a donation.
The search term suggested a news item on the same page about a group of students who started an open library in Pune. This seems to have sparked autorickshaw drivers, bloggers, professionals, etc. who maintained similar open libraries in their own spaces.
A search for similar open libraries or for a list of them took me to the page of the Open Library project. The Wikipedia page of the Open Library project says:
Open Library is an online project intended to create “one web page for every book ever published”. Created by Aaron Swartz, Brewster Kahle, Alexis Rossi, Anand Chitipothu, and Rebecca Hargrave Malamud. Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization.
A perusal of the Open Library blog led me to reading posts by someone called mek, who turns out to be Mek Karpeles, according to the same Wikipedia page above.
A search helped me find Mek’s MediaWiki based website. Once upon a time, when I was a Wikipedia editor, I too had wished I had had such a website. Kirk had such a wiki, but I can’t find it now. Another thing that I have not fully explored but loved is Mek’s blogroll.
And thus the journey goes on, in a Web not intermediated by social media websites. When you click on links not only to find what’s there but not knowing how it will look like. That was the Web that I entered in 2004 and its good to be back there again.
Anu Atluru said this better than me in a note on Substack:
I wish publications in the Substack app had as much personality as they do on web. I get the standardization but it makes the vibe less personal, less like stepping into the writer’s world, and more like modern “social media” sameness.
This rabbit hole helped me learn more about libraries and blogrolls. Maybe they are similar? I already have a library worth of books under my children’s bed in storage. I want to implement some kind of blogroll on this blog as well.
That may need clicking on another link rabbit hole.
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"And it’s sometimes surprising to me how insightful my younger self could be, which I think is explained largely by the fact that most of my writing is written at peak states of clarity, while most of my life is lived in the moderately muddled middle. I’m a generally wiser 34-year-old than my 25-year-old self was, but when my 25yo self was having a peak experience, he was typically wiser in that moment than I am on average day today. And the great thing about writing, journalling and so on is that we get to integrate our peak state wisdom into our ordinary lives."
– for future reference, visakanv's frame studies, Visakan Veerasamy
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And at any given time, you’re either pre–heavy thing or post–heavy thing. You’ve either made something weighty already, or you haven’t. Pre–heavy thing people are still searching, iterating, refining their direction. Post–heavy thing people have crossed a threshold. They’ve made something substantial, and it shows. They move with more confidence and calm.
No one wants to stay in light mode forever. Sooner or later, everyone gravitates toward heavy mode—toward making something with weight.
– Make Something Heavy, Working Theorys by Anu Atluru
I think the whole post is worth reading in full.
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I learnt of this while reading Manuel Moreale's Peoples and Blogs conversation with Ben Werdmuller:
At some point, I’ll need to change my domain name. Werd.io is part of the .io top-level domain, which is assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory. Quite rightly, and far too late, the British are ceding that territory back to Mauritius. At that point, there will be no British Indian Ocean Territory, and by ICANN’s rules .io will stop being supported.
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Weekly Notes 10/2025
I returned to work this week, working from home, after the surgery. I am slowly catching up at work. My consumption of OTT content has gone up, in terms of hours but I have started reading The Times of India, RSS feed, and newsletters on the mobile in addition to the books.
Reading
- Tiny Experiments, Anne-Laure Le Cunff
- The No Book, Tim Ferriss and Neil Strauss
- Discworld Rules, Venkatesh Rao
- With Great Power Comes No Responsibility, Cory Doctrow
Writing
I tried to write a few Status Update posts here using Wordland that Dave Winer made. This was bought to my notice by Doc Searls.
I agree when he says in a later post that it feels like tweeting. I have been off social media for the past one week. I think writing with Wordland makes up for the writing I lose because I am not on social media.
Watching
I was happy to watch Toll Free Traveller again.
This was a different podcast with Shephali Bhatt compared to the one she did with Amit Varma.
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Parallel Spirals 