A year or so ago a friend and colleague approached me with a crazy idea – what if we tried to re-invent the tech conference, expanding it to become a celebration of all innovative companies that are inspired by the values of the open Internet? And further, what if it wasn’t a conference at all, in the normal sense, but more of a festival, a combination of an artist’s open studio, a music festival, and a business event?

That’s what became OpenCo, an “inside out” conference where instead of sitting in a stuffy hotel ballroom, you go our into the modern working city, to see founders talk about their companies in their native environment.

Last Fall in San Francisco, we tested the idea with a pilot, and more than 2000 folks registered to go visit companies like Twitter, airbnb, Google, The Melt, and scores more (85 in all).

Today, we’re announcing that thanks in large part to our Tour Sponsor American Express OPEN Forum, the OpenCo platform is coming to four cities this year – starting this coming May 22-24 in New York.

But to get there we need your support too. I don’t directly ask for help from all of you, but this time I am. I believe in OpenCo as a movement – the kinds of businesses we curate into the festival are literally changing the world, and this festival lets them open their doors to the public and share their knowledge with the community. We keep at least a third of the tickets for to the public, but we also sell tickets at various levels for those who want to ensure they get access to the companies they really want to see. We’ve raised an IndieGoGo campaign to cover our hard costs. That’s all I want to do – see this idea spread.

So please go to the campaign and support OpenCo at any level you can.

Companies in New York that will be opening their doors include Warby Parker, Etsy, Foursquare, Kickstarter, Buzzfeed, Business Insider, Lerer Ventures, General Assembly, Rebelmouse, RapGenius, and many, many more. If you have a New York business, you can apply to be an OpenCo here.

More on OpenCo can be found at the main site, by reading the coverage of our announcement here, or reading the release, pasted below.

THANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING US!

———–

OpenCo Innovation Festival Expands To New York City, London, Detroit and San Francisco for 2013

Indiegogo Funding Campaign, Host Company Application Process and Early Attendee Registration Open Today

SAN FRANCISCO, April 9, 2013 – Today OpenCo, a new kind of conference-as-festival where a city’s most innovative companies open their doors to the general public, announced the expansion of the event series for 2013. On the heels of a very successful inaugural San Francisco event last Fall, OpenCo is expanding to highlight innovation on the East Coast via an event in New York City from May 22-24, 2013 as part of Internet Week New York.

To support the overall OpenCo initiative, an Indiegogo campaign launches today to help cover fixed costs related to event logistics. There are currently four pledge levels, each offering a selection of value-added benefits. Please visit the OpenCo Indiegogo page to pledge your support of innovation in New York and to get first dibs on visiting exciting companies like Buzzfeed, Etsy, Foursquare, Thrillist, Warby Parker and many more!

Additional dates and details for the OpenCo events launching in London, Detroit and San Francisco will also be available shortly via the OpenCo website.

How OpenCo Works for Attendees

• On May 23-24, OpenCoNY participants will be able to attend hourly, citywide “open studio” sessions led by participating host companies (HostCos).
• Just as with bands and stages at a multi-day music festival, attendees go to the OpenCo website to customize an event schedule from “tracks” that are curated according to industry and neighborhood.
• Individuals who make a pledge to support OpenCo via Indiegogo will receive early access to the schedule picker site and will be able to build their personal schedule according to the following tiers:
  • $500 Backstage pledges gain access on Monday, April 29^th.
  • $100 Reserved pledges gain access on Monday, May 6^th.
  • $25 Fan pledges and the general public gains access on Monday, May 13^th.
  • The event is free for anyone who wants to attend, so sign up now by visiting openco.us.
  • Space is limited and we expect the event to reach capacity very quickly. In fact, more than 2,000 people registered for the San Francisco event during the three-week window.

How OpenCo Works for HostCos

• The HostCo application process officially opens today, but scores of companies have already expressed their support and interest in participating including: AOL, AppNexus, Betaworks, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Buzzfeed, Estee Lauder Online, Etsy, Fab.com, Foursquare, General Assembly, Kickstarter, Lerer Ventures, Local Response, Pave, PolicyMic, Rap Genius, Rebelmouse, Thrillist, Warby Parker, ZocDoc.
• These participating host companies will share their business vision, outline their founding principles and values, and discuss what it means to be part of NY’s collaborative ecosystem.
• Each HostCo is required to host at least 20 attendees – but the more the better.
• The event is free for HostCos, so feel free to suggest an innovative company as a potential HostCo by visiting openco.us.

Backstage Access Kick off Event with Special Guests

OpenCoNY will launch the evening of May 22 with an invitation-only, VIP event at The Altman Building that will feature intimate discussions with Chad Dickerson, CEO at Etsy, Bob Pittman, CEO at Clear Channel Communications, Matt Seiler, Global CEO at IPG Mediabrands and Eric Hippeau, partner at Lerer Ventures. Interested attendees who submit an Indiegogo pledge for $500 or more will receive coveted back-stage access to this event in addition to other great perks.

Those Who Make OpenCo Possible

OpenCo is made possible by a list of impressive organizations that have pledged their support as partners. Founding partner is American Express OPEN. The OpenCo event series is produced by BattelleMedia.

Quotes

“Innovation is everywhere and by opening up the doors to these openly collaborative companies, OpenCo gives investors, job seekers and curious neighbors the chance to hear these inspiring stories firsthand,” said John Battelle, OpenCo co-founder and CEO at Federated Media Publishing.

“The best way to experience and learn about the innovation economy isn’t in a stuffy conference room – it is up close and personal and on their turf,” said Brian Monahan, OpenCo co-founder and managing partner at MAGNA GLOBAL, part of IPG Mediabrands. “All participating companies share a commitment to open communication and open collaboration that is the hallmark of modern, innovative businesses. We are thrilled to bring the OpenCo philosophy to New York for Internet Week this year.”

Videos

OpenCoSF Highlights 2012

OpenCo business case

About OpenCo

OpenCo is a mix between a business conference and artist’s open studio with the vibe of a music festival. The events offer job seekers, investors, marketers and curious neighbors direct access to the leaders of the most innovative companies across the globe and in their natural habitat.

Visit openco.us for more information.

Press Contact

Clint Bagley

415-699-8280

clintbagley@gmail.com

The post OpenCo Is Coming To NYC, But Only If You Support It: Please Help Us! appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog.

The agenda for our seventh annual CM Summit is live. And it rocks. You can read all about it here. I am really looking forward to this conversation, mainly due to the quality of the folks who are coming. Oh, and the theme, of course.

I won’t beat around the bush. I want you all to come. I’ve lowered the price, because I heard from many of you last year that the ticket was too high (it sold out anyway). But this year, the conversation is too rich for anyone to cry poor over. Come and join us.

Speakers include Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann, Yahoo CMO Kathy Savitt, USV partner Fred Wilson, Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia, Jacki Kelley, CEO North American of IPG Mediabrands, Amanda Richman, President of Starcom MediaVest Group, AOL Networks CEO Ned Brody, GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving, AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley, Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Perretti, and many, many more.

Register here! Early registration ends in two weeks.

The post Can We Bridge Data to Humanity? We Best Talk About It. appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog.

Over on the LinkedIn Influencer network, I’ve revealed how I manage my often-overflowing inbox. It’s not exactly rocket science, but enough people have found it interesting that I thought I’d share it in a professional context. If you’re interested in stuff like this, give it a read and let me know what you think. From the post:

—-

Whenever I hear a friend or colleague complain about how their email inbox is “out of control” I take the opportunity to toss out a humblebrag: I never go to sleep before getting my inbox down to ten or fewer messages. Every so often, I even get it to zero.

Like many of you, I use my inbox as something of a To Do list. If something is lurking in there for more than a day or two, it usually represents something I have to get around to doing. Right now, for example, there are 15 or so messages awaiting my response. (Only 15? Yes, that’s the beauty of keeping it under 10 before bed, then culling again right before breakfast).

Of those messages, one is a memo written by a colleague I need to read, respond to, and distribute to others. Another is a suggestion of a book I should read. There’s a reminder that a draft of a blog post is ready for my review, a request for a guest column in Ad Age (that’s a big commitment of time, I’m letting it percolate), three meeting requests, and two requests for me to review new businesses for purposes of investment or advice. There’s also a couple email news summaries (from News.me or Media Redefined) – these are sources for posts I write each Sunday night called Signal.

That’s a pretty typical looking inbox for me, and about five more such emails come in every ten or so minutes. Each is a marker asking for my time. …..By the end of a typical workday, I’ll have about 70-90 pre-screened emails sitting patiently in my inbox, all of which I’ve determined demand some kind of response. This is when things can get hairy. After all, each mail probably equates to at least two or three minutes of focused time, often more. That’s at least three hours of email to get through each night!

This is where my “Crack” folder comes to the rescue….

More here!

The post How I “Crack” My Inbox appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog.

I heard you all, and I just made my RSS feed full text and images again. Thanks for all your feedback, and we’ll just have to live with the fraudsters. Till we don’t. Which will probably be never!

The post I’ve Turned Full Feeds Back On appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog.

Starting a business is a journey, as any founder will tell you. When I started Federated Media Publishing almost eight years ago, I did my best to collect all the lessons learned from Wired, The Industry Standard, and Web 2 Summit, and apply them to my new venture. One of those lessons was that it’s OK to step away when the time is right. Several years ago, I did just that, becoming an “active Chairman” at FMP and handing the operational reigns over to an accomplished executive, Deanna Brown.

Since making that decision, FMP has grown dramatically, but it’s also had its challenges. Last year, for example, we made the difficult but important decision to rethink the company so as to lean into our two most promising lines of business – content marketing (which we lay claim to inventing as “conversational marketing” some seven years ago) and programmatic marketing (which we invested in heavily last year, after acquiring a very fast growing business in Lijit Networks in Fall of 2011). It meant stepping back from something we had been doing for some time – directly selling standard display banners  - but it proved to be the right choice. FMP is having a great first half of 2013, and I couldn’t be more excited about our roadmap and potential for the rest of the year and beyond.

The funny thing is, even as I became “just the Chairman” at FMP over the past two years, I never stopped thinking about the company. It woke me up nearly every night, tugging at my sleeve, asking me questions, demanding my best thinking. Deanna and I would meet every week to talk strategy, review numbers, or just plain chew the fat. Running a company with hundreds of employees, top notch investors, and a big top line revenue number is damn hard, and Deanna not only ran the place, she made it hum. I am in her debt.

So when Deanna told me earlier this year that she wanted – in a thoughtful and appropriate manner – to move on and do something smaller and more directly related to content creation, I immediately understood. As I said above – it’s alright to step away when the time feels right. We spent a month or more thinking about who might be best to replace her. FMP is a unique company – straddling the two fastest-growing sectors of the digital marketing world:  Native content marketing, and programmatic platforms. There aren’t many executives who are fluent in both, and who also might be a cultural fit for a company as storied as this one.

And then it hit me – quite literally in mid-sentence while on a Board call. Why the hell don’t I simply step back in? I love this company, I am passionate about the Independent Web, and to be honest, I see a huge opportunity in front of us. What am I, nuts? Why didn’t I think of it the moment Deanna told me of her decision?

I think the answer lies in how we often try to convince ourselves that the choices we’ve made in the past are the right ones. I agonized about leaving the CEO’s chair, and I’ve spent the two years since then convincing myself (and many of you) that the right path for me was writing a book , running various conferences, and ruminating on what the “next big thing” might be.

But I’ve come to realize that it’s OK to change your mind, as long as you are following your heart. I love the book I’m working on, and I don’t plan to abandon it (I’m bringing on a co-author). And I love the conferences I do, and I’ll still be doing them (though I’ll be hiring someone to run them full time). But my first love is the company I started in 2005, whose story is not only unfinished, it’s at the height of its running narrative. I am utterly convinced that the media company of tomorrow will have both a technology-driven programmatic foundation, as well as the ability to execute bespoke, beautiful ideas on behalf of the entire media ecosystem – creators, marketers, and communities. When you bring the scale and precision of data-driven platforms to the brilliance of great media executions, magic will happen. Delivering on that vision for the Independent Web is the mission of Federated Media Publishing. And I couldn’t be more excited to rejoin the company as its next CEO.

So that’s the news I have for you today. I ask for your support as I embark on this new journey – I know I’m going to need it. I promise I won’t ever stop writing here, nor will I stop asking for your feedback and your insights. And because this is probably the only time I’ll have the chance to say it in a post, I want to say thank you to Deanna Brown for what she’s done not only for Federated, but for me personally. I can’t wait to see what she does next, and, if I’m lucky, to be a partner to her next chapter. Onwards!

The post On Coming Back to FMP appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog.

Some random site running my last post without asking.

If you’re a fan of this site, you’re also probably a fan of RSS – a once-ascendant technology that has been on most everyone’s deathwatch for five or so years. According to Google’s (almost totally outdated) Feedburner service, nearly 450,000 people subscribe to this blog via RSS – although the number of you who actually read my posts is far smaller (according to Feedburner statistics, which I’ve never fully understood).

In any case, from time to time I’ve poked at you poor RSS readers, just to find out if you’re alive. Remember this piece – Is RSS Really Dead? Or this one - Once Again, RSS Is Dead. But ONLY YOU Can Save It!?

In those posts, I asked if my beloved RSS readers were really out there. Turns out, I got tons of comments back – a very high number given the work involved in declaring fealty to the creaky old standard. (It kind of felt like a reshoot of that wonderful final scene in Horton Hears a Who – “Everybody yell real loud, and maybe Google will hear, and not deprecate Feedburner…”  But I digress.)

I’ve always kept my RSS feed “full text” – which means the entire post, pictures, words and all, goes out over RSS, and can be picked up by any RSS reader anywhere on the planet. I always have held the belief that it’s more important that my work get distributed than monetized. But not everyone can afford such high minded principles. Many publishers cut their feed short, teasing folks with headlines and a snippet of the story in the hopes that people will click through to the site, where their visit can be properly “monetized” via advertising.

My new feed (sadface).

After much thought, I’m going to do the same. But not for the extra clicks and ads. It’s due to the fraud that’s taken over the content space in the Indpendent Web. Untold legions of bad actors use RSS to scrape “real” sites like this one, then wrap them with ads from exchanges to make a quick buck. The rise of programmatic fraud has made this even worse (see It’s Time To Call Out Fraud In The Adtech Ecosystem for more on this). And no, I’m not going to link to examples – but you can Google “Content Scraping” if you want to learn more.

So, consider this an apology. I am very sorry that you have to click a link to get to the content I make here every day. But also consider this a plea – as in, please do click that link at the top. I very much want you to be part of this conversation.

(And if enough of you complain, you know I’ll listen, and figure out some way around this).

UPDATE: I turned full feed back on. Thanks for all the input.

The post An Apology To My RSS Readers – But I Had To Do It. (Updated) appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog.

Some of the more than 25 speakers already joining us at the 2013 CM Summit.

Over on the brand spanking new CM Summit website, we’ve announced our initial speaker lineup and progam theme for the 2013 event – Parting the Clouds: Bridging Data and Humanity.

This is the seventh annual CM Summit, the fifth as an anchor conference for New York’s Internet Week. It’s a direct result of nearly a year of work on my book, and inspired by research into the programmatic, data-driven world of advertising technology as well as some very deep roots in brand building and digital media.

The speakers are an extraordinary bunch – and this is just the first group. There are many more to come. For any of you who have been to previous events I’ve curated, you know we really sweat the details – in particular the intellectual framework of the program itself.

More on the theme:

In a scant few years, data has become a critical driver of business decisions – and increasingly, a fundamental currency of all human endeavor. But to marketers and consumers alike, “data” is often a poorly defined term that can elicit confusion, anxiety, and even fear.

Our society has embarked on a historic conversation around the role of data in business, government, and our personal lives. In the seventh annual CM Summit, we’ll seek to define just what data really is, and how we might bridge the concept of data to not only marketing, but to a deeper understanding of culture and humanity.

We will create more than 3.6 zettabytes of data in 2013 – roughly 565 gigabytes per person on earth. And that rate is doubling every two years as we adopt ever faster and more innovative devices – in particular, mobile devices untethered to one “desktop” or even one “phone.” Ten years ago, the very idea that someone might map their “social graph,” tweet their “status,” or “check in” at a location was unthinkable. Now it’s commonplace. What might be common ten years from now, as we begin to monitor our health in real time, and place sensors in our homes, automobiles, clothes and wallets?

How do we get our arms around such abundance and complexity? And how can businesses position themselves to compete in such an environment? 2013 will mark the CM Summit’s most ambitious and far reaching program. Rooted in the firmament of digital marketing, the event will reach out to explore the human implications of data, algorithms, mobility, and technological progress. In the past ten years, the marketing industry has built one of the most intricate ecosystems imaginable, with real-time bidded exchanges and powerful layers of algorithmic logic, all driven by massive storehouses of data. And while this ecosystem began with the desktop web, it’s spread to encompass mobile, video, and even search. At the Summit, you’ll meet the people behind this world, as well as the agencies, marketers and brands who power it.

We’ll continue our tradition of rigorous, in depth interviews, practical case studies, and eye-opening “high order bits” that will challenge traditional thinking and provide context for doing business in a data-driven world.

We work hard to earn your time and money, and I hope you’ll consider supporting this, the only executive conference I’m doing this year. It’d mean the world to me. Register here. I hope to see you in New York!

The post The 2013 Summit Arrives: Bridging Data And Humanity appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog.

I’m a fan of Paul Berry & Co’s new curation platform RebelMouse (I’m also a small investor). Many content companies have adopted the service as their “social front page,” including TIME, TechCrunch, the USA Network and many more. Now thanks to the folks at RebelMouse (and my wizards at Blend), Searchblog has a similar page. You can see it here, I’ve also added it to the navigation bar at the top.

RebelMouse organizes the things you tweet, post to Facebook, etc. into a clear, coherent presentation, and give each person the tools to arrange them however they want. It’s pretty cool. Check it out!

The post The Searchblog Social Front Page appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog.

Every year around this time I do two things: First I look back at my predictions from a year ago and grade myself, then I get around to making a new set of predictions. These are often my most popular posts of the year, proving the old magazine saw that the world loves a list. So who am I to buck the trend? Let’s get cracking on seeing how my crystal ball turned out, shall we?

As you can see from my 2012 predictions roundup, I took something of a new approach to the prognostication game last year. Instead of one lengthy post with all my predictions, I actually broke them into a series of posts, seven in all. I went into detail on why I thought each forecast would prove correct (save the last one, which was a series of “shoot from the hip” predictions.)

I’ll be as brief as I can with this review – this marks the ninth time I’ve done it. Overall, I’ve had a pretty good run of it. I hope 2013 keeps pace.

Predictions 2012: #1 – On Twitter and Media - Twitter will become a media company, and the only “free radical of scale” in our Internet ecosystem. 

The post Predictions From Last Year: How I Did (2012 Edition) appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog.

Browsing Hacker News, which I’ll admit I don’t read very closely (because, well, I’m not a hacker), I saw an interesting headline: I quit Twitter for a month and it changed my thinking about mostly everything. Well, that’s going to get my attention.

I clicked through and noted the author’s name: Adam Brault. I don’t know Adam Brault (at least, not well enough to recall reading him before), but with a headline like that, I sure wanted to read the piece. It’s quite a thoughtful rumination on his snap decision to stop using Twitter for the month of November.

Some of what Brault said didn’t resonate with me, not because I disagreed, but because it’s clear he uses Twitter in a very different manner than do I. He follows people closely and feels a connection to them that I rather envy. I follow more than 1200 people, and I’ve become a bit inured to the resulting torrent.

For me, Twitter provides a first level filter, and I then use various second-order services to tame my feed. Those filters (news.me, Percolate, Flipboard, even TechMeme) depersonalize my consumption habits. No one human voice regularly makes it into my second-order filters (but a lot of publishing brands do). In short, I don’t have much personal social capital invested in Twitter, even though it’s a very important part of my life.

Brault, on the other hand, noticed that he had perhaps too much personal investment in the people he followed in Twitter. From his essay:

I had one moment of weakness last month, when I logged into my other, private Twitter account, just to check in on what the 20 people I follow on that account had been up to recently. Within minutes I felt depressed, as I learned there was a conference canceled because people attacked it as a sexist speaker lineup and the organizers just folded rather than wade through the deluge of attacks or try to fix things… I just felt horrible for those organizers… and there was nothing I could actually do other than feel bad. It served no one any benefit and it just derailed my evening….

…I’ve realized, Twitter is outsourced schizophrenia. I have a couple hundred voices I have consensually agreed to allow residence inside my brain.

Reading that passage, I felt something – I empathized with Brault. I remember what it felt like to be connected like that. And I realized I have never been connected in that way through my “new” social media. Facebook has always been a wipeout for me, LinkedIn a utility. The only “social media” I’ve ever deeply cared about are personal blogs – which for most folks younger than 30, are usually understood to be artifacts of a pre-Facebook, pre-Tumblr, pre-Twitter era.

Writing out loud on a regular basis is not for everyone. It takes a fair bit of focus and commitment to maintain a site where you write essays for public consumption. Brault mentions that it took him at least three hours to finish his post. In the early days, tons of folks took to the blogging medium, but over time, many burned out. But I sense people are coming back to this form, because it’s a pleasure to write out loud  every so often. It needn’t be a chore, in fact, it should be joyful. I’m guessing Brault – a software and web developer by trade – has taken true pleasure in the social expression his essay has allowed.

Call it a hunch, but I think a new generation of creators are realizing that if something is really important to them, then it’s worth taking the time to write a longform essay – one that best resides on a site that is theirs.

In the blog-only era of the early 2000s, folks like me had our personal site, and we also watched a set of sites that we truly followed. RSS was our Twitter, and we carefully pruned a list of other folks who we’d check each day. I let about 40 or so “voices into my brain” each day, and those voices mattered to me, a lot. Most of us even created “blogrolls” – links to folks we felt were worthy of attention (really – remember those?!). And when someone wrote something noteworthy, others in the network might write a response, always with a link back.

This pattern still happens, of course – that’s what I’m doing now. But it happens far less regularly, and without the clear social network that used to define communities of blogs. Those early communities have been eclipsed by professionalization (I remember following what Mike Arrington wrote each day, before it turned into TechCrunch The Site, for example), but also by burnout and by the easy dopamine hits of Facebook and Twitter. Add to this the lightweight reblogging ethos of Tumblr, and the recent rise of bespoke platforms like Medium or SVBTLE, and we no longer have robust communities of individuals calling and responding in bursts of essays, each emanating from a unique, independent place on the web. I think the world’s a bit poorer for that loss, even as it has become a far richer place overall.

Reading Adam’s essay, I mourned a little for the way it used to be. I’m keenly aware that I’m sounding like a nostalgic, but I take heart in this rising class of “every so often publishing.” If only there were a better way of surfacing all this good stuff….hmm.

Meanwhile, Brault’s essay had another wonderful insight worth repeating:

It’s pretty simple: if I have my email turned off and I set aside a day with no meetings and no commitments other than to the work that’s on my mind, I am going to do very good work, using my best creativity, and will produce in good volumes.

In a day with even one simple standup meeting, I feel like the entire day’s focus has a layer of thought dedicated to that meeting—light stress and perhaps some preparation fills up more than the specific calendared time slot….

…I used to believe that time was the most important thing I have, but I’ve come to believe differently. The single most valuable resource I have is uninterrupted thought.

That’s how everything I’ve ever felt was meaningful about my entire life came to be—either people I’ve come to know, things I’ve learned, or stuff I’ve created.

I feel exactly the same way. If I have just one call on a day I’ve cleared for writing, the day feels tainted. It’s nice to know I’m not alone.

Circling back to the point of this post, I believe that the personal-site-based essay is making a comeback. I’m finding all manner of great pieces of writing lately, stuff that’s just too good to simply retweet and forget. Like this from Vibhu Norby (I promise to write a response soon, it’s an important topic). It was on a personal site that I rediscovered Craig Mod. When I did, I added his feed to my creaky old RSS reader. I just did the same for Norby. That made me think of Matt Haughey, one of the more wonderful early bloggers. Turns out, he still writes every week or two on his site. But, far as I can tell, Matt’s site has no RSS feed. Adam Brault is on Tumblr, so no RSS there either, at least that I can find. I’ll do my best to visit from time to time, but man, I’d sure rather have all his stuff pushed my way.

Of course, the debate about whether or not blogging and RSS is a dead medium has been raging for years. Clearly, RSS is no longer a universal standard. Regardless, I find it comforting that when someone with a truly unique point of view has something important to say, they often return to their own site to say it there. I hope they all keep writing. I’ll be listening.

The post Writing Every So Often: The Personal Essay Makes A Comeback appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog.