I’ve been blogging since 1999, when we still called these things “weblogs.”
For most of that time, this blog and my professional life overlapped a lot: They were both mostly about technology. They were both from the perspective of a journalist, first in the tech trades (InfoWorld, PC World), then consumer magazines (Mobile PC, WIRED), then the startup/VC blogosphere (VentureBeat).
In the past year, though, the stuff I’m publishing on my blog has diverged from the tech world I work in.
Now, while I still write about tech, I’m just as likely to be posting about swimming, books, poetry, or a range of topics that I guess you could call “how to live a sane life in an insane world.” In the past 14 months just two out of 10 posts here have been tech-related.
I suppose it’s time to give my readers fair warning: After 19 years this blog, and the Tinyletter based upon it, have moved in a more eclectic direction. If you want to unfollow me now, I won’t take it personally. But I’d love it if you stayed along for the ride.
Blogging is still a useful medium for sharing medium-length ideas, especially since I stopped using Facebook. (Seriously: Facebook is bad for you.) Dave Bonta’s poet bloggers revival project has inspired me to post more. And I think I’ve got a couple books in me that need to come out and see the light of day; some of what I’m working on will appear here as rough drafts first. I still do occasional freelance writing and those stories will show up here, too.
This blog will hold to the same publishing standards: It’ll continue to be just as thoughtful, well-sourced, and well-written as possible regardless of topic, particularly when it’s one of the posts that is also going to the email newsletter. I’m not turning this into a daddy blog or a purely poetry blog; I still want what I publish here to be relevant and interesting to a broad range of people. (Plus, you can follow me on Tumblr if you’re interested in more poetry.)
I’ll continue to write about tech here occasionally: My day job is running communications and content at Valimail, and most of my waking hours are spent thinking about email, authentication, phishing, cybersecurity, and how to create and execute massively effective marketing and communications content campaigns for a growing Silicon Valley startup. As part of that job, I write a lot of posts about email and publish notes from the research reports I produce on the Valimail blog.
I will continue sharing the best insights from that world when they’re relevant to a broader audience. It’s just that those “techie” posts will not be the only posts, or even the majority of the posts, on dylan.tweney.com.
Will you stay with me? Will you bail? Either way, I want to thank you for reading these words, and I wish you the best.
Please subscribe to my Tinyletter if you like what you see. Let me know what you think — and do stay in touch.
I never got the Blogger hoodie! It’s okay though, I wouldn’t have looked as cool as this guy.
