I recently saw the poet Harry Baker. My girlfriend was the fan and wanted to go, though I had also enjoyed what little I had seen of him.

It was at Saint Saviours Church Hall, St Albans, which is the hippest church I’ve been to. There was kegs of beer, fairy lights and some sofas to the side of the nave. And the vicar had a shaved head, tattoos and wore cargo shorts.

I was a huge poetry nerd in my tormented teen years (14-17). But these days I don’t have much interest – and certainly not in modern poetry. So I wasn’t massively looking forward to a night of non-stop poems.

But the show was great. His poetry is perfect for the modern era. Funny, witty and with a great musicality. The way his voice delivers lines is wonderful. There’s an earnestness to the way he speaks that is enrapturing.

And he didn’t overstay his welcome. I was worried it would be 2 hours+ of non-stop poetry. But it was just the right length, with a break in between where you could buy a book and meet him.

When my girlfriend met him she decided to go down the more casual route. Rather than a “huge fan of your work, you’re my hero”, she went with a simple “hello, how are you?”. He didn’t appear to be expecting such an unassuming greeting and it led to 45 seconds of incredibly uncomfortable awkwardness. The stilted back-and-forth continued painfully as she hurriedly chose a book and he hurriedly got out the card reader. I couldn’t help but laugh.

In the grand tradition of web hostility, SoundCloud has made a bold move.

They’ve decided that your time isn’t valuable. That your experience doesn’t matter.

Want to skip ahead 30 seconds in a podcast? Sorry, you’ll need to sign in for that privilege.

It’s essentially a throwback to the days of linear radio. No control. No choice. Just sit there and take it.

How many listeners will try to skip, hit the sign-in wall, and never return? It’s a textbook example of prioritising metrics over user experience.

I get it. They want more sign-ups. They’re chasing those “monthly active user” numbers.

But in the race for engagement they’ve forgotten the most important engagement of all – the one between the listener and the content they love.

If your sign-up growth strategy involves frustrating users, it’s time to rethink your strategy.

Dave Winer has been blogging since 1994. And extensively too. His output is remarkable. And the result of that is nearly everything that he references and talks about from the past has a blog post he can link to. You can see his thinking in real time and get a great deal of context.

And it makes me want to both blog more freely and frequently and also live life more publicly online. And I think that there’s good arguments to be made for writing publicly on a weblog, rather than in offline software.

I’ve used the journaling app Day One for years. It’s been around for a while and now that it’s owned by Automattic I expect it will continue to be around for many years.

But generally speaking, software is more brittle than the web. It often uses proprietary formats and is prone to abandonment. Whereas the web is more open, easier to back up and won’t go away any time soon. In 50 years time I’d be shocked if a HTML/CSS webpage can’t still be shown the average computer still. I doubt Day One will still be around.

And in my 20 years of writing and journaling I’ve used many different software. The end result of that is my writing is all over the place, in different formats and different apps.

So what if that whole time I just used something like WordPress instead? Today my thoughts would all be in one place, nicely tagged¹, easily searchable and with a URL that I could link to.

Then there’s the tricky subject of death. If I die today no one is accessing my journal. A journal that might be interesting to my family. But if my thoughts were on a blog they could see them easily.

Of course there’s privacy concerns with the web. WordPress does let you make posts private or hidden behind a password. But data breaches can happen and things can leak. So that is a downside.

But my whole point is that I want more of my thoughts and life to be public. If I’m honest I’m not one of those people who pours my heart out in my journal anyway.² So 90% of what I write I’d happily make public and that’s my aim.

With clowes.blog I’m attempting to live a bit more publicly. But it still doesn’t come close to what Dave Winer’s scripting.com does. For me to get there I need to share and write more frequently.

So I’m going to try it. I think future me will be glad I did.