Tom Critchlow

I appreciate when blogs include a "start here" section, like https://tomcritchlow.com/start-here/, or equivalent. Sometimes a bunch of content can overwhelm a new visitor, so entry points are appreciated. See also: - random post button - most popular posts - author's favorite posts

Great points about noise, and you really hit it on the nose with your final point—I've heard of a mental model of Twitter being likened to tapping a tuning fork and seeing who resonates (https://twitter.com/kevinakwok/status/1076967914580918277). The most fun (and probably best) self promotion is done with fun in mind—Tom Critchlow's post on small b blogging vs. content marketing comes to mind (https://tomcritchlow.com/2018/02/23/small-b-blogging/), and he extends his thought with this one (https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/03/12/strange-attraction/). I also liked Matt Webb's post on this (https://interconnected.org/home/2020/09/10/streak). Please excuse me if I'm being pedantic, I'd change the "hope" point to "showing a person"—even if it's just an email to a friend, cold emailing someone who you quote, etc.

I’ve tried similar myself but I love the visual simplicity of this. Much nicer than a list. If you’re interested I came across this year’s ago … some nice inspirations and ways of finding new stuff. https://tomcritchlow.com/wiki/books/bookshelves/ My favourite is this one with the little toggle for reviews or comments: https://daverupert.com/bookshelf/

I became aware of both of these articles through Tom Critchlow's writing on Digital Gardens. In this piece, he references the Garden and Stream concepts, while also adding in his own, Campfires. https://tomcritchlow.com/2018/10/10/of-gardens-and-wikis/ Then in this follow on piece, he touches on Stock and Flow referencing the original article. https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/17/building-digital-garden/

Some good reads for this topic: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consulting_1 https://chrisachard.com/how-to-find-consulting-clients https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/27/i-consultant/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18227768

Author here - yeah I hear you. I love the hypothesis interactions when they happen on my site but the UI is a little aggressive (especially on mobile). All about tradeoffs unfortunately. FWIW I posted a little UX teardown of the different annotation platforms here if you're interested: https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/12/annotations/

Here's a post from another company that's been using it: http://tomcritchlow.com/private-google-plus-engagement . I understand that some people might be skeptical of G+ in the workplace. Some people were skeptical of Google Apps in the workplace, and that's fine. But G+ can be a really powerful tool for companies that want to use it. One more anecdote: I have a friend whose company just moved from Lotus Notes to Google Apps, and they love Apps. I can easily see people in that company hopping on video calls or posting internally.

As I said somewhere in that thread, I only ever encounter arguments against value-based billing from other contractors/consultants, and not companies. There's probably a psychological topic there to explore but I won't go there. I have nothing to gain by convincing other contractors/consultants, except the feeling that I helped someone escape the hell that is hourly billing. Yes, it helps to be offering some unique value that can't just be found on Upwork (see excellent posts on this [1] and [2]), but you don't need to be in the 99th percentile to do value-based billing. I don't know much about the author but they're probably in that 99% whose work you think is commoditized (or at an equilibrium). Clearly this is not true, since they were paid $21k for work that could've been done by a large portion of that 99%. [1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/ [2] https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/04/04/the-strategic-independent/

Previously discussed (June 2020; 63 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23468175 See these blog posts also: - https://tomcritchlow.com/2020/06/09/quotebacks/ - https://nesslabs.com/quotebacks

Consider sharing your OPML feed as a blogroll, too! https://tomcritchlow.com/2022/04/21/new-rss/

I'm kind of a JSON maximalist because I find it really simple and haven't put too much thought into it. I'd also like to shout out https://www.jsonfeed.org/ https://jsonresume.org/ https://tomcritchlow.com/2020/04/15/library-json/ https://geojson.org/ It'd be pretty cool to have an ecosystem where you could ``` $ packagemanger init my-site password $ hostOfChoice deploy ``` Go to the url, auth yourself, then have a list of "plugins" that act as a ~cms for formats like the ones above Edit: Could you at least tell me why you're downvoting

The comparison with double entry bookkeeping seems a little bit far fetched, in my opinion. But I like the enthusiastic tone of the article and I understand the comparison as a starting point for brainstorming new ideas! I am now reading his post about RSS (https://tomcritchlow.com/2022/04/21/new-rss/). Good stuff!

> ... whole internet as a sort of "Pandora for Books" Rings so true. Deciding on what to read is not an easy problem. Here's some digital bookshelves for inspiration: https://tomcritchlow.com/wiki/books/bookshelves/

You might like the "small b blogging" ethos :) https://tomcritchlow.com/2018/02/23/small-b-blogging/

There has been a growing movement around the thought that one's website is their digital garden, for example: https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/17/building-digital-garden/

Business opportunity here to replace this? Start with some HN or Reddit style forum discussion code. Some income could come from affiliate links to indie booksellers. (Is there even infra for such a thing right now? Need to build that too?) Edit, answering myself, this guy has some thoughts: https://tomcritchlow.com/2020/04/15/library-json/ Edit, as for the index corpus, the USLC does okay: https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/search?searchArg=0312937385&searchCo…

There's also a nice blog post at https://tomcritchlow.com/2020/06/09/quotebacks/ (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23467586. There were a few comments there but we moved them hither.)

Chapter 2 is also available: "Optimism as an Operating System" https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/11/19/optimism-operating-system/ I'm really looking forward to chapter 4, "Status Switching", as it's a skill I'm very keen to further develop. I wish I could get an email as soon as it's posted.

The gist is to mine your network, and the best is when you can have contacts as champions in your clients’ companies. Here are a few good readings; - [20 Lessons for Attracting, Signing, and Retaining Great Clients](https://www.theforcingfunction.com/blog/service-business)([archive](ht… - [How to be a Consultant, a Freelancer, or an Independent Contractor](https://jacquesmattheij.com/be-consultant/) ([archive](https://archive.is/iun16)) - [How to Find Consulting Clients](https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-learned-to-get-consulting-leads/) ([archive](https://archive.is/STvcv)) - [The Strategic Independent](https://tomcritchlow.com/strategy/) ([archive](https://archive.is/O5OKC)) - [A retiring consultant’s advice on consultants](https://www.economist.com/business/2023/08/17/a-retiring-consultants-a… ([archive](https://archive.is/Slqwj)) - [How to Find Consulting Clients](https://chrisachard.com/how-to-find-consulting-clients)([archive](http…

Some of my favourite "digital garden" websites: - http://100r.co/ - https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/home.html Made by the same people, but the second is more technical. I can't deny that there is a certain sense of visiting someone's home (in this case someone's sailboat) that is completely absent in the modern, sterile and utilitarian blog format. It is a pleasure to get lost following interesting links, chancing upon slightly dusty, delightful corners. This is why I appreciate what https://neocities.org/ is doing, a lot. Every single one of those websites featured in the home page is not only nostalgic, but a treasure trove that someone manually collected and organised. It is ironic and sad that as technology improved, we lost Frontpage, manually written HTML and the soul in personal websites, now many are just stock Jekyll templates hosted on a github.io domain. As someone that has struggled to blog all my career, I wonder if organising my thoughts cleanly into a polished but fleeting article just doesn't fit my way of thinking, and I would be better served by a personal website just about stuff I care about, which I keep updated over the years, and might go a bit dusty over time. Not a shop window, not a magazine, but an open garage full of thingamajigs collected over the years. -- More written words on digital gardens: - https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden - https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/17/building-digital-garden/

Thanks for reply and for have shared your project first! > I think we can refresh some the things that make it powerful with a fresh coat of paint, to make it more accessible to a “younger generation.” That's what scare me, again in general: I see regular small complaint of modern absurdity, posts like: - https://tiramisu.bearblog.dev/your-desktop-is-not-a-destination/ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33838697 - https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/61535.html - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/02/07/epitaph-to-laptops/ - https://rsapkf.org/weblog/q2z/ - https://tomcritchlow.com/2022/04/21/new-rss/ - https://jfm.carcosa.net/blog/computing/usenet/ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33510169 - https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remind/ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28363453 - https://github.com/akkartik/teliva - https://akiflow.com/ - https://onezero.medium.com/the-document-metaphor-desktop-gui-doesnt-wo… - https://den.dev/blog/user-hostile-software/ - https://www.charlieharrington.com/smart-phone-dumb-terminal/ - https://mattmower.com/2021/08/02/what-we-lost/ and COUNTLESS others, similarly many "new stuff"/innovations appear and are actually partial, limited and limiting solutions to problems already solved decades ago in a more broad and superior way. Emacs itself is a bit horrific in the sense that it's codebase is hard to be kept up by modern developers who have troubles knowing it, but at least represent the classic…

One of the problems with Solid is that it's definitely guilty of the sort of criticism that surfaced (brought up by a reader) in related to some of the things discussed in an earlier post about "Library JSON" <https://tomcritchlow.com/2020/04/15/library-json/>: > That said, the thing that kills the indieweb is too much enthusiasm for specs, too few[...] implementations, and, ironically, too much focus on the ‘indie’ (building complicated self-hosted everything-machines) and not enough on the ‘web’ (noticing if anyone’s using any of the things you built). So if there’s a killer implementation and good content at the start, then momentum would potentially just carry you through. One thing I'm fond of is a turn of phrase earlier coined by Noel De Martin, a contributor to Solid: "Autonomous Data". The intention to put resources behind "Autonomous Data" as a brand/movement was set aside to focus on the Solid effort instead. I think, though, that the term is well-suited for the rough ideas presented in this post. (Better than "triple entry blogging", in any case. Better than "Solid" or "Zero Data"[1], too, in my opinion.) 1. https://autonomous-data.noeldemartin.com/ 2. https://0data.app/