Author: Edward Jensen

A blogging renaissance?

Are we standing at the front door to a blogging renaissance?

Back in October, I put some thoughts out on LinkedIn about the future of social media and if we’re headed toward a renaissance of the blog. Given the public agita about the current social media landscape and the associated issues regarding content moderation, ownership of those platforms, and bullying and minimization of minority communities.

Personally, while it had been festering for some time, I finally pulled the plug on my use of Twitter. While I had been using it for 15 years, it felt to me like it had run its course and was far more noise than signal. And, to be absolutely fair, the whiplash changes to that platform under its new ownership helped push me to making this decision. It doesn’t feel like a huge loss for me.

The heir apparent to Twitter seems to be Mastodon, but I’m not sure if I’ll go on that. Not because I have issues with that tech stack – it sounds fantastic and totally dismantles the so-called web3 notion that anything decentralized has to have blockchain technology and some sort of transactional monetization to work – but because I’m not sure if I need to be on that. You might recall my essay on Five for the New Year 2023, in which I said one of the things I’m going to work on in 2023 is limiting digital distractions. It’s also why I want to spend my time in this world, and not some digital “metaverse” world that is definitely totally happening* at some point in the future.

I’m therefore led to make the following bold proposition: One of the major moments in the changing of the internet from independent communities to being controlled by a handful of social media companies was when Google killed Google Reader ten years ago. Instead of a choose-your-own Internet that was based on what you wanted to read from the sites and sources you chose, social media companies sucked us in to their sites and subjected us to their algorithms and rage. If you wanted the latest news from major news organizations, you are left to the whims of the social media networks whether they’d even allow it, or if the platforms were even telling publishers the truth. And that all led to the advertising dollars going to the websites that got the most views, which were not the traditional journalism outlets and newspapers, but rather internet content farms.

I digress. This isn’t about my views on the internet, but on blogging specifically and my proposition that blogging will see a renaissance in 2023. I realize my blog is a special case, because this is not a revenue-generating operation for me. With platforms like WordPress still out there, and even with some free or relatively inexpensive, there’s no barrier to entry.

I’ve been at this for well over a decade now, and I think I quite like it. In 2023, it takes a renewed interest with more frequent essays and columns, and frequent photography. The best part? It’s mine. Not Meta’s or Twitter’s.

Mine.

blog image derived from a photo by 4motions Werbeagentur on Unsplash

Five for the New Year 2023

With a new year comes a new way of thinking about things. Here are five thoughts as we stand at the doorway of 2023…

Happy New Year to everyone. Let’s hope that 2023 is less chaotic than 2022 was.

In the spirit of a new year with new beginnings and new possibilities, I’m offering five things I’m going to work on in this New Year 2023. I’m hesitant to call them resolutions, but that’s probably what they are. Rather, I look at these as things I’m going to be deliberate about in this new year, and hopefully beyond.

Disable the electronic distractions. In the course of an average week, 72 hours is not dedicated to work or sleep. That’s less than half of the hours in a week! In that 72 hours, that includes errands, cooking and meal preparations, home chores, hobbies, learning, and also everything else that has to happen. And, now that I’m in a different city from friends and family, it means I have to be more deliberate in when and how I connect with them. One of the things I noticed toward the end of 2022 was that I was on my phone a lot. I’ve deleted all of the social media apps from my iPhone, instead accessing them in the browser on my computer. I’m going to work next on tuning the focus features on my iPhone, making sure that I only get the notifications that are important to me and engage on the spaces that are important to engage. With apologies to Mastodon, I probably won’t go there.

Automate this blog. No, I don’t mean turning over the authorship keys to some AI software to write whatever it feels like. Rather, I mean finding ways to automate photo posts. I’ve taken quite a few photos of my new city, and trying to find a way to post them without me having to think about it. I have a few thoughts on that, but I’m wondering if WordPress is capable of handling it. That’s a whole different thing…

Write more. In one of his talks, the technologist Scott Hanselman reminds us that we only have so many keystrokes left before we shuffle off this mortal coil. A technique to be efficient with that is to put responses or writings on a common platform (if it’s appropriate, of course). So I sense that instead of sending a few emails to external partners that might be on a common topic, that may be a writing for this blog.

Get back into the piano practice habit. When I moved to Minneapolis, my baby grand piano went into storage in a climate-controlled facility in suburban Phoenix. The rationale was that it wouldn’t have fit in my interim apartment I have in downtown Minneapolis, and I only want to move the instrument once. Now that I’m settling in to a new space that isn’t that apartment, I’ll get my piano back. It’s been a long year without it, and I can’t wait to have it back. It’s worth investing some of my ~72 weekly hours in! Now, to get back to working on Debussy’s Suite bergamasque…

Throw caution to the wind once more… It was a tremendous leap of faith to move up to Minneapolis to take this position at Meda and the epitome of throwing caution to the wind. I’m not saying I’m going to leave Meda to move again – there’s so much left that we can accomplish together at Meda – but I’m thinking of doing something out of the ordinary. Getting involved in winter sports? Flying lessons? Finding an entirely new hobby? This will be fun to see how it progresses.

As this New Year 2023 is not even one day old, these are some of my initial thoughts. I’ll be writing more on these subjects throughout the year, not to mention sharing some of my photography. And if there’s a post that pops up that seems out of the ordinary, then you’ll know what I’m being asked a lot.

Happy New Year 2023!

The exit interview

About a decade ago, the Phoenix architect Taz Khatri gave the urbanist Yuri Artibise an “exit interview” of sorts. I adapt the formula here

About a decade ago, the Phoenix architect Taz Khatri gave the urbanist Yuri Artibise an “exit interview” of sorts after he left Phoenix for British Columbia. While the original post has been lost, the internet doesn’t forget, and they’re on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Continue reading “The exit interview”

As I was saying (big news)

As it’s been a few months now, I guess I should fill in my blog readers (all four of you) of some major news

As it’s been a few months now, I guess I should fill in my blog readers (all four of you) of some major news. In April, following a whirlwind recruitment process, I joined the staff at Meda, the Metropolitan Economic Development Association, in Minneapolis. That meant that I had to relocate from Phoenix, the up-until-now subject of this blog (and the only place I’ve called home) to Minneapolis, in somewhat great haste.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll highlight some of my adventures in my new city, share some observations and photography, and some thoughts as I can about being back in my element – IT within the nonprofit realm.

Friday Five: Updates to A Brief History of Midtown Phoenix

In this installment of The Friday Five, it’s time to dust off the slides and update A Brief History of Midtown Phoenix

Back in April 2019, I prepared and delivered my lecture, A Brief History of Midtown Phoenix. The lecture spanned the past 1,500 years of midtown Phoenix history and included a survey of Midtown’s buildings. The thesis of that lecture is that the abrupt end of World War II in August 1945 caught Phoenix and Arizona leaders by surprise, thus setting up developers to build a new city that fit what they wanted. That was the North Central Avenue corridor, which is what we now call midtown Phoenix.

In the two years since that lecture’s creation, there have already been a few things that need revising as Midtown’s changed or as recent scholarship has found new details. In that spirit of continuous improvement, and also because it’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these, here’s my Friday Five of revisions to A Brief History of Midtown Phoenix.

A quick content warning: One of the items contains news and subject matter that may be distressing to Native Americans. As a courtesy, the content of this point is after the jump.

Continue reading “Friday Five: Updates to A Brief History of Midtown Phoenix”

Hunga Tonga volcano pressure wave

The 15 January 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga volcano had some interesting effects felt thousands of miles away

Early in the morning of 15 January 2022 (Phoenix time), the Hunga Tonga volcano erupted in the south Pacific Ocean. Tsunami warnings were issued for the coasts of the Pacific Ocean. As of the time of this writing (Sunday morning, 16 January 2022), there’s no word yet on damages to nearby Tonga.

Of considerable interest is that the eruption created a giant atmospheric pressure wave that traveled around the world. That pressure anomaly hit the weather station I have perched atop a building in midtown Phoenix, which you can see in the image. I believe the time of the +0.02 inHg anomaly matches up with when other sensors in the area saw that pressure wave.

Daryl Herzmann, who maintains the impeccable Iowa Environmental Mesonet (which I’ve written about before), tweeted out this graphic showing the pressure wave marching across the United States (EDIT, Sunday evening: a second graphic is below, and is objectively awesome):

The National Weather Service office in Phoenix noted the pressure anomaly as well. Their instruments, working in concert with other NWS offices, found two different pressure waves.

And finally, for a good overview of the entire event, Scott Manley offers this video: