What is /Message?
/Message has gone through a lot of changes over the years. At the present time and looking forward into the future, this blog is my principal location for sharing my ongoing open research agenda.
By open research I am not claiming to be a classical academic or analytic researcher (see About Stowe Boyd). On the contrary. But I am pursuing (or advocating) what I have been calling the social revolution for quite some time, and /Message is the primary means for me to express my theories, present my observations about what others are saying, and critique products and companies operating in that space. I am more of a synthesist than an analyst, but no one uses that term. I think of myself as a cross between a software theorist and webthropologist, if that helps.
In the past, this blog was a group activity with different folks participating at different times, but in the end, I brought it back to where it started, a place where I can collect my thoughts and share them, and to some extent chat with my friends and colleagues about them. Increasingly, the discussion has migrated away — off to Twitter and other microstreaming contexts — but this is still the center of my long-form, tech life.
At various points in the past, I have tried to develop other sites where I would tout my services, but in this most recent housecleaning, over the Labor Day weekend, I have clarified what it is I do as a solo consultant, advisor, speaker, and analyst in a few short pages here.
I have recently decided to straighten out the categories here, and am in the process of recategorizing all the posts, going back to the dim dark days. This may take some time to rework, but for all posts going forward, these are the categories I am using, and I hope they are fairly self-explanatory: Commentaries, Critiques, Interviews, Plans, Presentations, Theories, and Writings. (Note that these categories indicate the type of the post and not the content within, which is indicated by tags. I may write a short post on this distinction in the near term.)
As part of the cleanup here at /Message, I have also moved a number of personal or non-tech observations over to /Ambivalence, such as political yammering and travelogue. If you are looking for something like that, an old bit of music I may have posted here, for example, it’s likely to be at /Ambivalence.
And of course, a great deal of my web interaction that used to be expressed in short post here is now flowing through my Twitter stream, and I still haven’t found a good way to connect those threads effectively. You simply have to watch both to see what I am up to, although as a general rule, nearly anything I write here, of any weight, I will likely crosspost to Twitter.
