Kottke, the blog that curates the best of the whimsical and creative web and reflects the eclectic personality of its founder, Jason Kottke, is turning 25. I have been reading and enjoying his blog for an eternity. He has kept the site the same, though he has paid some attention to the realities of the distribution of information on the Internet. “I’m not gonna go through the whole history of the site, but it eventually took off in a way that I didn’t anticipate,” he writes about his blogging milestone. Jason was one of the earliest believers in blogging, a few years following folks like me, who were a few years behind Dave Winer and Doc Searls.
I turned my blog into a business, later lost control of my blogging destiny, and had to find a new home here. But Kottke has always been steadfast in his presence, design, and focus. His tenacity to keep going and doing it alone is admirable. In a (long) podcast conversation with John Gruber (who has been blogging on Daring Fireball for two decades himself), Kottke nerds out about the web, blogging, protocols like RSS, and, of course, name-checks some of the other veterans of blogging.
Congratulations, Jason, on the journey and weaving a wonderful hypertext web!
March 14, 2023. San Francisco
PS: Jason and John, in their podcast, talk about how blogging has inspired many social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. I wrote about this about a decade ago, which is worth reading. Blogging is the genesis and has inspired many ideas and behaviors on the Internet, and it is time for blogging to evolve.