Tag: Newsletter

  • Weekly Notes 45/2024

    I felt like this was a rich week for me. I got a lot done at work and it has reached a steady cadence. Below, you will find what I did when I was off work. Summarizing it here leaves me with a good feeling about going into the weekend.

    Health

    In the beginning of the week, I was interested in learning about health supplements. I asked the question whether I needed it or not. The answer came out to be – only a few simple ones – Vitamin D3, Seacod, and Calcimax-P. I buy these for the kids anyway, so not too much of an additional cost.

    Newsletter Nerd

    I have been interested in building a newsletter on the side. I am working with Saurabh at C4E to build a health and health-tech newsletter. While my space newsletter will remain free, I am spending the next six months or so writing for a business. I want to be able to help you to build your own newsletter at the end of this.

    Community

    In the late 2000s, you could get on X and find a person who was interested in something that you were and work together. I was wondering how this happened now. The answer seems to be on the cozy web on WhatsApp and Telegram.

    I am part of a few such communities but discovering these communities is hard.

    Shephali Bhatt wrote about how the community is the conduit for creators in The Economic Times. A week ago Kommune had also put out their report, Consumed, that spoke of these trends, among others.

    Pranay Kotasthane of The Takshashila Institution wrote an X thread on what makes a great digital community that is worth reading.

    One of the communities that I looked at again was the IndieWeb community. I like reading Manuel Moreale’s People & Blogs series. I hear Jeff Triplett’s appeal to publish and write more on blogs:

    PS: Write and publish before you write your own static site generator or perfect blogging platform. We have lost billions of good writers to this side quest because they spend all their time working on the platform instead of writing.

    I have been fortunate to join the community at thinkdeli where I have been writing the first draft of my novel publicly. More on this below.

    I tried to read two of David Deutsch’s book and did not get it. If you have a book circle that is interested in reading his work, I would love to join in. Please leave a comment on this blog or reach out to me on X or Mastodon.

    Reading

    There is some issue with the Audible billing that I have not been able to fix. I re-listened to Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman again.

    I have been reading two books on writing, as I write:

    • On Writing by Stephen King
    • Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

    I have been reading Finding the Oasis by Sandeep Mall as a way to look at health, wealth, and relationships in an integrated way.

    I read Spacecraft Navigation – A Mini Guidebook by Sumana Mukherjee. This helped me revise some of the concepts regarding satellite and spacecraft navigation. I discovered this via her LinkedIn post. I enjoyed reading about how interstellar spacecrafts navigate.

    Writing

    I went back to Zettelkasten again. I still have the stacks of notecards at home which my daughter borrows from me sometimes for her own creative endeavor.

    I had gone through several rabbit holes in the past – starting from the book by Sonke Ahrens. I then went on to watching YouTube videos of Scott P Scheper. He held my attention for a while.

    The latest writer who has captured my attention is Bob Doto. I am still reading through his writings on the Zettelkasten. Doto’s book A System for Writing is very expensive.

    These are the links to the novel that is titled, Green Earth, Grey Moon, and Red Mars.

    Tumblr tells me that I have posted 1000 notes there.

    I want to return to writing the space newsletter with a refreshed format.

  • On following people’s work

    I’m seeing a trend that I want to encourage. People are dusting off their old blogs and websites and starting to write on them again.

    One reason for this is the changes in social media usage. People I used to follow on Twitter are now using different social media platforms like Instagram, Threads, Mastodon, Farcaster, Discord, Telegram, micro.blog, LinkedIn, and some have even quit social media altogether and moved to blogs. So, I need to find out where I can interact with them now.

    My virtual voyages through some of these blogs helped me discover the IndieWeb (via Jatan Mehta). It was here that I was introduced the concept of Publish (on your) own site, syndicate elsewhere (POSSE). It would be great if everyone did it, but not everyone does. So, I am left with following people I like following in the places where they publish.

    This doesn’t work well for me, though.

    This is why I love the trend to move to blogs (or anything that I can read on a feed reader). This allows me to read on a feed reader rather than on a browser or an app.

    Maggie Appleton, in her essay, A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden, talks about the concept of the garden and the stream. Many of the places that I follow people are streams. These are timeline based feed of activity.

    A feed reader is still a stream but one where the curation is mine and not an algorithm’s. I want to allow the algorithm to help me discover people whose work I would like based on my previous activity. But, I would like to follow and consume them at my own pace, perhaps in my own feed reader or inbox.

    Newsletters (especially Substack) hold a place in between. These seem to be an implementation of the solution I talk of above. The Substack algorithm seems to help you to find people you may like following. You also get to consume them at your own pace in your email client or on their app.

    You will notice Substack’s attempts to push you to read on their app. You have had a history of other apps changing ownership or their algorithm in ways that are outside your control. This is how Substack diverges from my expectation above.

    Substack is a good temporary solution for my problem. But, I have no control over how long they will stay good. If a feed reader closes (like Google Reader did), alternatives will emerge or I have the option to use other feed readers like Thunderbird.

    Feed readers also let me easily move to another service. If Substack shuts down, I will have a hard time finding the people that I followed on Substack on other platforms or blogs.

    There were two brilliant essays that I read recently on why we must move on from newsletters to elsewhere, that I think of as part of this trend that I see. I hope these two essays will encourage people to POSSE.

    1. Newsletters; or, an enormous rant about writing on the web that doesn’t really go anywhere and that’s okay with me – Robin Rendle
    2. Getting too good at the wrong thing – Nat Eliason

  • Substack post vs blog post

    When people used the word blog posts to refer to their Substack posts, I found it difficult to understand why. I thought of each post on Substack as an edition or as an issue. When people pushed back to ask me for the difference between a Substack post and a blog post, I felt that it was fundamentally wrong but could not articulate the reasons for the same. I was reading Venkatesh Rao’s blog, Ribbonfarm, where he has articulated the reasons much better than I have.

    I don’t agree with all of his points but these are good points to begin thinking about this.

    1. Blogs are ontic media; newsletters are epistemic media
    2. Blogs encourage you to invent concepts and coin terms; newsletters encourage you to use existing concepts and terms to lay out persuasive arguments
    3. Blogs are portals; newsletters are flags. Blogs encourage you to build seductive worlds to draw people into. Newsletters mark out territory in existing shared worlds.
    4. Blogs encourage true essays in the original sense of the term — explorations; newsletters encourage explainers, sermons, speeches
    5. Blogs are promiscuously and publicly social; newsletters are clannish and tribal
    6. Blogs are stocks; newsletters are flows
    7. Blogs invite internal and external hyperlinking; newsletters fight both
    8. Blogs are relational; newsletters are transactional
    2021 Ribbonfarm Extended Universe Annual Roundup, Venkatesh Rao