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Before Twitter, Whisper and Snapchat there was the Blog – the platform that made it possible for non-techies to publish on the internet. And if you grew up in the 90s, chances are you probably had one at some point – a Livejournal, a Blogger, a WordPress or Diaryland.

This year, the Blog turns 20. To mark the anniversary of the medium, we asked three blogging pioneers to look back on the transformation of the medium over the past two decades, and share their thoughts on new platforms like Snapchat and Twitter.

As someone whose first online platform was on Diaryland, I am surprisingly happy to see it get its proper mention in this Guardian piece. It was my first online community! It’s where I met my wife!
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Biopics Aren’t About People. They’re About Making Money | Underwire | Wired.com

Biopics Aren’t About People. They’re About Making Money | Underwire | Wired.com

BBC America’s ‘Fleming’ promises to tell the story of the man behind Bond – but in doing so, says more about how we downplay the value of creators in today’s pop culture.

I wrote this for Wired about a new trend towards making biopics that serve existing franchises rather than the people they’re theoretically “about.”

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The company said that the website, the first dedicated site the Sunday People has had, did not hit the traffic targets that had been expected over the three months since launch.

People.co.uk, a multi-million pound digital offering dubbed “Buzzfeed for grown-ups”, went live on 5 November… The Daily Mirror publisher has previously said that its digital projects, such as the successful UsVsTh3m, have to produce results or they will not continue to be backed.

“Our aim is to become one of the UK’s leading multi-media publishers and we will only achieve this by experimenting with new digital ideas,” added [Trinity Mirror chief executive Simon] Fox.

Trinity Mirror closes People.co.uk after just three months, citing failure to hit traffic projections. Three months. That’s insane.
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To be totally honest, I never expected the Icon sales to be so low. I love the line of books and have been buying them from Issue 1, but the orders after Issue #1 (of Painkiller Jane) were extremely low and I am not sure why.

I think a lot of websites have been ignoring the books they are putting out and spending a lot of time looking elsewhere or at only the superhero books that Marvel has put out.

That’s Painkiller Jane writer and co-creator (with Marvel CCO Joe Quesada), Jimmy Palmiotti, talking about low sales on the book’s relaunch with Marvel’s Icon imprint. A quick glance at Comichron suggests that the Marvel issues sold on par with the series’ run with Dynamite Entertainment (which is to say, U.S. orders in the low 6000s).

Palmiotti seems to be squarely blaming the low orders on websites not covering the Icon books. I’m wondering whether that would change if Marvel put any marketing or promotional muscle behind the line whatsoever (I suspect that it would). As it is, Icon feels like an imprint that Marvel tolerates, not one that Marvel promotes.

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A sign of my mood, I worry, this song was in my head as soon as I woke up at the appropriately insomniacial time of 4:38am today. I have a love/hate relationship with Nirvana that mostly hews towards the latter, but as much as the (purposeful?) misunderstanding of how the Salem Witch Trials actually worked – “If she floats, then she is not/A witch like we’d thought”? No, it’s literally the other way around, Kurt – I have a fondness for this song, mostly down to the guitars that feel like “The End” by the Beatles played by a drunk garage band and the absolutely perfect opening couplet.