Personal — Page 23

Yesterday at Harrumph

March 6, 2001 by Michael Boyle

: the slipper strategy, or rather, why small dogs come in pairs. This is quite possibly the pinnacle of personal/anecdotal commentary on a personal site. At least of the light variety.

, or is what Thom Calandra (editor in chief of CBS MarketWatch) says in this interview completely off target in the current context? Maybe it’s just me, but I strongly believe that doing anything for a mass market on the web in 2001 is doomed to failure. His comments read, to me, like unadulterated thoughts from 1997.

A principle of the web that has emerged: if the barriers to access are low enough, users will tend to be drawn to more specialized, niche-oriented material. Weblogs are not the be-all and end-all, by any stretch of the imagination – but it’s not a coincidence that the form has thrived and that tools have been built to maintain them easily. Personal publishing is just the opposite side of the same coin in terms of the development of content online. As niche web publications built out since 1999, so did niche-focused publishing tools begin to thrive.

There’re a lot of

February 21, 2001 by Michael Boyle

little piles of excellent words over at Cardigan Industries. The piece to which I link, as prompted by Jeffrey Zeldman, is a particularly tart piece about a man who, if I knew him personally, I’m quite sure would be my nemesis – Mr Martin Amis.

Personal note

February 7, 2001 by Michael Boyle

: You can put an idea for a website on the table and I can turn that into a half-million dollar proposal including detailed product descriptions, market analysis, competitive analysis, flowcharts, timelines, personnel requirements, etc. in a couple of days or a week. You can give me a vague notion of a new feature you want in an existing site and I can analyze it, figure out what it should be and how it should fit, in great detail, no problem. Offline – no problem – I once edited and largely rewrote an 800 page postal procedures manual. But I can’t deal with basic bureaucracy.

I’m going to be here, here, and at a couple other seemingly random government offices today.

Interesting development

February 6, 2001 by Michael Boyle

in Michael World. I have a promising interview next week for a job I’ll take if it’s offered to me. It’s still a web-centered job, but it’s on the other side of the table – not for a vendor (a web shop, an interactive agency, a dot-com, etc.) but for a purchaser of web services. It’s an appealing thought in that it will likely be a bit more stable than your average dot-com. And better managed as well, I bet.

Meanwhile, I’ve been furiously working on three sites simultaneously plus a possible redesign of this site to mark its first anniversary, which is on the 13th of February. February also marks the 6th anniversary of the launch of my first ever personal site, which (unfortunately, though it was an abomination) is completely lost now.