Bloggers Still Have Considerable Impact on This Planet
Today I learned that my neighbour (2 doors away from yours truly as a child, for well over a decade) had died. He was 81. He was the head of a university where I worked. He was a very famous person and he was always kind to me. He managed to be intellectually brilliant and a very excellent person at the same time (don't take this for granted; many people have only one or the other). Looking back, I realised that as a kid I knew him as a man in his 40s and 50s. Now he's gone. Forever. In his later years it seems like he no longer engaged much - if at all - in publication (the university foolishly added his list of publications as a .docx file, not PDF or HTML!).
This is his legacy.
Phoronix is turning 22 in a few days and 5 days later Tux Machines turns 22 as well (we've already booked travel for the party); Phoronix is still super-active or hyperactive, but some of it is marketing, either better or worse than LLM slop (hard to decide which one does more harm).
Michael (the main face of Phoronix, but others are involved or were involved) is about the same age as my wife and while we don't agree on some things (we did chat regularly in the distant past) I admire his perseverance and his ability to keep a high publication throughput, with little or no "fully-offline" vacations in between. He must have published about 50,000 pages/articles since he launched this modest site:
The site in 2004 was simple and it's still not bloated if one manages to block all the ads. In terms of reach of publication, the site has delivered billions of pages, as did we. It adds up over time. Even if most people don't read articles from beginning to end (or "proper" start to finish) it helps set the tone, the perception, the discourse which follows.
Nowadays, in academia almost anywhere in the world, there's growing expectation that lecturers will spend not much of the time doing research or even teaching; they need to mark tall piles of exam papers (repetitive and tiring), peer-review the work of other people, tutor some students (both under- and post-graduate), and waste time on administrative tasks such as totally worthless time trackers or timesheets (everybody cheats on those to get the chore out of the way). How are they expected to produce much mindful text, charts... actually original work? They can't. They barely can.
The future of publishing is not social control media (short and highly volatile); academia (scholarly work) is also vastly diminished or reduced to corporate marketing tasks spun as "research". Some of my superiors in university life were part-time GAFAM staff. How sad a conflict of interest!
If you want to change the world, then start blogging. Do it in your own platform, not the Beehiivs and Substacks of the world. █