2024 is upon us, and I couldn’t be more excited about GIVING UP. I’m halfway through Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, and this book’s theme is hitting hard. What are humans if not time itself? And if we live 4,000 weeks on average, how can we hoard info and obligations as we do and still be functional, fulfilled people? So, I’m starting Q1 by giving up unrealistic marketing expectations. Engagement rates, search traffic,…

Let’s pour one out for the most endearing email newsletter platform. This morning, Mailchimp announced they’re closing TinyLetter forever… migrate to Mailchimp or leave by March. Marketing platforms come and go like a fleeting Chicago summer. I knew this would happen, but that doesn’t make it less frustrating! So, what can we learn here?​ Lesson 1: Have a backup for the inevitable pivot or acquisition. TinyLetter launched in 2010. Then-admired Mailchimp bought it the following…

I’ve mentioned self-hosting in another post. The movement to supplant social media with personal blogs, coined POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere), has obvious benefits and challenges. But the odds are against us! Most folks will never know to disable motion smoothing on their beautiful 4k screens, and you want them to Inspect Source??? Then no-code Page Builders like Squarespace and Wix fill the void and create more proprietary lock-in, intensifying the damage…

Branding is hard. It’s a subjective process for stakeholders, designers, everyone involved. Some companies pay a budget freelancer sub $500 for what amounts to a clipart logo. Others pay tens of thousands and get the same result! Folks have to live with it for a long time, so landing somewhere even off-center feels like a Big L. Oh, and we needed this stuff yesterday but person can’t stop micromanaging a shade of corporate blue because…

Twitter is no more. Its rotting corpse shambles along as X, and rumor is the whole thing is going subscription-only. Pay for a regular dose of anxiety to microblog on some billionaire’s fiefdom? Hard pass. While Mastodon has some governance and onboarding issues, its privacy and automated purge settings are admirable in the age of corporate surveillance. If you’re not already there, I hope this guide helps you out. And if you’d like a 20-minute…

X neé Twitter, Reddit, Stack Exchange… Summer of 2023 was about digital watercooler destruction. Here’s some “light reading” that helped me make sense of it. These all poke the same wound. Social platforms are juicing revenue by eroding their experience AND the cultural media institutions we relied on. American television usage dropped below 50% for the first time! Not like I’m crying over it. But the void has jilted our collective trust in what comes…