Click “I agree” to continue. You didn’t click it, though. Or maybe you did? I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. The concept of consent doesn’t exist on the mo...

Over the last few months, all the nerds have gotten excited about Model Context Protocol , or MCP. It's a spec that was designed by Anthropic (the Claude folk...

I keep having a conversation with people around the tech world about how the industry’s current state of change — especially the potential disruption of incumb...

You've heard the call to action at the end of nearly every podcast you've ever listened to: "Listen to us on your favorite podcast app", or in the ph...

Not too long ago, I said "Thanks to the mistrust of big tech, the creation of better tools for developers, and the weird and wonderful creativity of ord...

Mastodon and the fediverse are clearly taking off, bringing in millions of new users, and also organically inspiring a wave of technical innovation that dwarfs...

Thanks to the mistrust of big tech, the creation of better tools for developers, and the weird and wonderful creativity of ordinary people, we’re seeing an inc...

Security reports from other sites are welcome. Why aren’t safety reports? One of the most fundamental triumphs of the last few decades of open source culture...

Here’s how you do it. Build a platform which relies on cultural creation as its core value, but which only sees itself as a technology platform. Stick to t...

Amongst the many new publications that's popped up in the current newsletter boom, I've been enjoying Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci's "Embedded". One...

These days, I'm a hobbyist web developer. That used to be a common thing people did; it was like having a crafting hobby, but with web pages. Over the last dec...

I was delighted to discover Omar Rizwan's TabFS , a brilliant hack that lets you see your browser tabs as folders and files on your computer, because it's inc...

In the early days of Twitter, there was a pleasingly low-tech tradition called "follow friday" (which people later denoted with the #FF hashtag), whe...

People are wrong on the Internet every day; generally I don’t try to fuss about that too much. But when Sam Lessin, a former VP of Product Management at Facebo...

Today, for about half an hour in the afternoon, pretty much every app that you might try on your iPhone would likely have crashed upon opening it. It's probabl...

Every day, millions of people rely on independent websites that are mostly created by regular people, weren't designed as mobile apps, connect deeply to cultur...

We don’t even notice it anymore — “link in bio”. It’s a pithy phrase, usually found on Instagram, which directs an audience to be aware that a pertinent web li...

Even though I watched the medium of podcasting being created since its inception, I'd always resisted a little bit participating myself. I think I just felt mo...

Playdate, the upcoming indie handheld gaming console from venerable software publisher Panic, is really important. But if you don't know the history of where t...

At a time when millions are losing trust in the the web’s biggest sites, it’s worth revisiting the idea that the web was supposed to be made out of countless l...

A dozen years ago, the web started to reshape itself around major companies like Google. We can understand the genesis of today’s algorithmic arms race against...

Every single day we’re hearing about the failings of big tech companies and what they’re doing to the web. The ethical failings, the transgressions against pri...

There’s been precious little documentation of the real cultural impact that the social web has had, particularly in its earliest years. So it’s exciting when p...

I spend so much time writing, and thinking, about technology and tech companies. And so much of it’s critical. I point the finger at how the apps and sites we...

In my years working in technology, I have learned a few things. These lessons have become oft-repeated refrains when speaking to people, so I thought I’d colle...

I got the chance to revisit some of the themes of the Web We Lost in the broader context of how we confront our mortality and impermanence in the digital r...

I lament the end of the personal CMS market; I was happy to back Ghost on Kickstarter today for the same reason that I back pretty much any effort at making...

When I wrote about the web we lost a few months ago, I thought the idea that we’d strayed from some of the philosophical and cultural underpinnings of the so...

One of my favorite aspects of the infrastructure of the web is that the way we refer to web browsers in a technical context: User Agents. Divorced from its gee...

(First, thanks/apologies to Andy Baio for listening to my musings on a mullet-style app strategy and coining “Mullet-platform”. It’s horrible and wonderful.)...

We have the obligation to never speak of our concerns without suggesting our solutions. I’ve been truly gratified to watch the response to The Web We Lost ov...

Update: A few months after this piece was published, I was invited by Harvard’s Berkman Center to speak about this topic in more detail. Though the final tal...

Most users on the web spend most of their time in apps. The most popular of those apps, like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Tumblr and others, are primarily focused...

Right now, there’s no App Store for Amazon EC2. Today’s just-announced “ Google Compute Engine ” isn’t plugged in to Google Play, the Android Music and app sto...

This is a long-ass post. In summary: Readability and Instapaper are two awesome reading tools that actually aren’t in competition since Readability is mostly a...

On Sunday, I interviewed Nick Denton at SXSW about Gawker Media, commenting culture on the web, and a good bit of the history of professional blogging. In ad...

This week, many of the web’s most popular sites shuttered their doors in protest of SOPA and PIPA, the pair of bills that had been winding their way through co...

A few nice conversations around the web, either in response to or inspired by what I’ve been talking about here: My favorite TechCrunch post in a long time...

Facebook has moved from merely being a walled garden into openly attacking its users’ ability and willingness to navigate the rest of the web. The evidence tha...

Today, ThinkUp is out of beta and available for free . If you have a presence on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ and know how to run a PHP/MySQL app on a web s...

Hmm, lots of interesting responses to If your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault , and even more interesting conversation about the topic of commenti...

One of the first questions venture capital investors ask people who make tech products and tech startups is if the entrepreneurs behind them are just trying to...

Great news for the web today, some of the smartest folks I know are doing what they do best: Making the web better. Take Paul Ford’s thoughts on “ Why Wasn...

The new Twitter is here! The new Twitter is here! Besides sowing discontent in our household by giving me access to the new user interface before my wife’s acc...

One interesting pattern I’ve noticed popping up around my favorite new apps these days is that they follow what I’d call a “cloudtop” design. I thought I’d sha...

I love the Internet. I love lots of things that are on the Internet. I have less love for things that want to undermine the Internet. Tim O’Reilly, The War...

More great responses to some recent posts to recap, along with an interview I did a few weeks ago that seems to be pretty timely. eWeek’s Clint Boulton of...

I’ve really been enjoying the response to my recent blog posts — here are some more thoughtful replies. Rafe Colburn, one of my favorite bloggers for a decad...

One of my biggest passions, personally and professionally, is the concept of persuasion. Whether it’s in the form of logical arguments or emotional appeals, I’...

John Scalzi shares a gem and kicks off a predictably stupid comment thread, based on an overheard coversation: “The problem with using the Web as a model for...

Before it was called Firefox, or Firebird, Mozilla’s lightweight browser was known as Phoenix. An appropriate name, given than it rose from the ashes of Netsca...

Picture Terry Semel holding a little lion cub up in the air with both arms extended. What’s that? It’s the Circle of Life! Well, maybe Circle of Life 2.0? Okay...

I wanted you to read this thread on Stripper Web (you know, the community site for strippers?) where the women share stories of farting on their customers. A...

Background: I once wore a funny t-shirt for a photo that appeared in the New York Times, and a bunch of people thought it was kind of amusing, albeit juv...

We’ve got another chance for the mainsream press to either laud or dismiss blogs, and I’m curious to see how it turns out. The thing to note is that, for these...

…and you put links in your browser, and that’s what makes the web work. Last October, Reason published an interesting look at bloggers’ overreactions a...

Hey, there! I’m your friend, so I didn’t want to be the one to tell you. But someone had to: Your April Fool’s Day joke sucks. Really, it does. April Fool’s...

We’re three (or more) years into the blogosphere’s love for GoogleBombs, and here’s another story on them. I’m glad I at least got to throw in a little quote...

David Galbraith has wisely dissected Blogebrity , but I’m going to preemptively call the Contagious Media Showdown in favor of Crying While Eating . Cryin...

One of the recurring ideas that’s been reasserting itself in my head recently is the idea of constraints being useful, and even necessary for creative work....

Other than amusing animations, the web was given to us that we might post cat pictures. (I picture Tim Berners Lee getting his liver plucked out by an eagle da...

Michal Levy reminds us what we love about the web. With Giant Steps , Levy took Coltrane’s masterwork and set it to Flash in a beautiful interpretation. Nothi...

I only mentioned this in passing in my post about accountability the other day, but the choices all of us make when creating software, or when finding new wa...

There’s a good ClickZ article on Reconcile Rising SEO Costs With ROI that quotes my SEO contest post in talking about the benefit of good content. Let’s hope...

My friend Jason Kottke runs one of the smartest blogs on the web. Yet today, when he clearly had outlined a conversation about political ads on his blog, the s...

So, Google’s own CEO has stated that Google is a media company , maybe it’s worth observing whether the world’s most successful Internet companies are media c...

It’s a bit of a silly thing to rail against, but the headline of this BBC story makes me livid: "Student died after buying web drugs". What the h...

Now that Netscape’s more or less officially dead, it occurs to me that it might be worthwhile for Google to bankroll the Mozilla Foundation , either by donati...

This is stupid. A while back, it was discovered that the U.S. government’s registration site for .mil domain names was wide open , making it possible for anyo...

Every time there’s a resurgence in general-audience (non-techie) interest in Google, as after Newsweek’s recent Google fawning , the issue of privacy in a pre...

You know, Bill Gates had a public appearance next to a giant inflated condom more than 24 hours ago, presumably with a dot on his forehead as he’s been wearing...

Microcontent is information published in short form, with its length dictated by the constraint of a single main topic and by the physical and technical limita...

Sometimes following the links into one’s site reveals precious little gems of the web. But then again, sometimes you just get NETQUEER . Apparently, when they...

Geeks are at their happiest when among those who understand them. One of the pleasant things about my job is being surrounded, to a certain degree, by geeks of...

There are people doing the work of science, manufacturing knowledge for the rest of us. I like to read about what they do, and maybe you will too. Go lookit G...

The current world wide web consists almost entirely of pages that are either stories or tools. A few ambitious sites combine these two types of web pages in va...

You don’t know what the World Wide Web is. But that’s okay, I don’t either. Nobody does. We’ve all been laboring under the delusion for several years now t...

If you can overlook the abominable layout, this thorough description of the technical differences between the file formats of WordPerfect and Microsoft Word...

There is some amusing human nature conclusion that I’m sure can be drawn from the number of emails, phone calls, and instant messages I’ve gotten about my anti...

The Morning News has a roundtable on writing for the web . It’s quite good....

Why do I like David ? Because he, like me, recognizes the power of Lionel Richie. Again, please note: This is not “Ironic Lionel Appreciation”. This is the Re...

So Google has an image search now, which, if it was announced, I had forgotten about. It’s great for finding pet pictures on the web, too....

PizzaMe ! (It’s what these pages used to look like.) As Jesse correctly guessed, this site was discovered in the pursuit of a photo that could be used...

From the realm of old-school web novelty stuff, here’s a link that you really won’t enjoy. Do not click this link ! No, I’m not kidding....

My blog-surfing list is in tumult. Meg thinks she has nothing good to say. While I doubt that’s true, I’m glad she can step away from something that isn’t g...

Well, Chason sums up a lot of my feelings more eloquently than I could…...

Jason emailed me about a bunch of Yahoo history links that he just added, and some of these are really great. I guess I am as guilty of the tendency for inst...

Yeah, so I’ve spent lots of time on the World Wide Web. But until today, I had never visited The Schumin Web . Please, go there. Don’t waste your time here–...

I know as a developer I’m supposed to hate Microsoft, but I’m really impressed by the whole (idiotically named) .NET thingy. ( Good explanation here .) But wha...

For later reference, I think I want to revisit Tellme Studio …...

Hmmm, now I can apparently surf the web while I’m in a cab . Did someone ask for this?...

RadioSpy has one mean-spirited 404 page …...

It’s amazing what someone can do with Legos , a magic 8-ball, and too much time on their hands . Another "Only on the Web" moment, courtesy of so...

Seems to me the web is the medium which marks the return of the aside to public discourse. Traditional media, dating back to the dawn of writing and speech,...

From the silly to the sublime… it seems the Internet brings out people’s interest in Meta-Content whether it’s Slate or Brill’s Content in my bookmark...

Phew! That was a long entry yesterday… but enough with the term paper on bioengineering. Let’s see if we can find a fun, interesting site, shall we? Or how a...