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We talk with people interested in WordPress publishing. You'll hear interview with publishers who happen to be using WordPress, and also people in the WordPress space.
Hey, and welcome to the PublishPress podcast. I'm Steve Birch, and here at PublishPress, we believe the WordPress is a world class publishing platform, and we talk with people who are using it that way. In this episode, I talk with Colin Devereaux from Nerd Press and also the Hubbub social plug in. And him and his team are using WordPress for world class travel bloggers and food bloggers. Some of these people have enormous media platforms now, all based on WordPress, and they're getting millions of visitors a month, and they have enormous social media and newsletter followings.
Steve Burge:I talk with Colin about those platforms and about how how his belief in owning the audience is helping those platforms grow even bigger. Hey, Colin. Welcome to the Published Press Podcast.
Colin Devroe:Thank you very much for having me. Love your show.
Steve Burge:Oh, thank you. It's great to see you again. I think we ran into each other in Portland at WordCamp US, I believe. We did.
Colin Devroe:It was a pivotal event for WordPress
Steve Burge:for sure. Yes. It was. That's that's a good way to put it. A lot of drama around it, but it was great to have a conversation with you.
Steve Burge:I didn't know before talking with you a lot of your background, and we'll get into that in the podcast. And I realized now that you're working with Nerd Press, which is a
Colin Devroe:Yeah.
Steve Burge:A big agency slash well, you describe it. What what exactly how exactly would NerdPress describe themselves?
Colin Devroe:Well, it'd be WordPress support that feels like family. We support large bloggers, large professional bloggers like food and travel blogs that have tens of millions of page views per month to keep their site up and running, backed up, secure, all while giving them the freedom to continue to do what they love the most, which is to whether it's travel the world, make food, and tell others about it. So, yeah, NerdPress.net is where you can learn more about NerdPress.
Steve Burge:So I I guess I'd asked before whether before we started whether blogger was a derogatory word, but you seem to say they have quite a bit of pride in that, perhaps because of their their origins starting as a blog. But some of these companies have grown into really professional media organizations now with hundreds of thousands, millions of visitors a month.
Colin Devroe:Yeah. I I remember the time when blogging was a term used on the news to to, like, you know, describe someone that was just blogging about their life or, you know, sharing the something that they're working on, like a a personal, you know, crafting project or something. But now the all of the news websites are blogs. So I don't think that the word blogger is derogatory anymore. I think the New York Times is a blog.
Colin Devroe:I think microblogging, like, on x or threads is a blog. And so blogging is bigger than it has ever been even though we don't maybe think of it that way, But there are more blogs today, certainly more active blogs today than there have ever been. As the Internet has grown and as usage has grown and these social tools have grown, blogging itself has grown. So the old guard maybe has moved on. Maybe the first the first bloggers to start it may not blog as much as they used to because they're old men like me, but and women.
Colin Devroe:But, yeah, the the blogging in general is is definitely not derogatory, and I think that it is something that that many would consider. I mean, it's in my profile on my social media on my social media accounts that I'm a blogger.
Steve Burge:So what does the what does the top level of this kind of blogging industry look like? What does a a very large food or travel blog look like? Is it is still one person, or they build out teams and video editors? What what is a without naming any names necessarily, what is a super successful travel blog look like?
Colin Devroe:Yeah. So from what I've seen and been able to interact with, especially when we go to these events like WordCamps or taste maker conference, which is a great food blogging conference that we go to every year and and and support through sponsorship as well, is, you know, everything from a one person all the way up to someone that has a dedicated team for creating the content or a dedicated team to take care of the technology pieces. Nerd Press usually can help them to extend their team, then we we come become part of their team. Some are engaging with virtual assistants a lot to take care of some of the more blocking and tackling of of creating all that content. If you could imagine, I mean, if you've ever blogged, I know you have, Steve, it is a lot of work these days to be present on all these different platforms or to take even just one piece of content and to form it for each of those formats.
Colin Devroe:Right? You think of TikTok as one format, Instagram as another, Flipboard as another, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And so there are tools that help you to take that content and form it for all of those different platforms, but it's still quite a bit of work for the publisher. And so many of them have teams to help with that. And, of course, there's when they get that large, there's business administration.
Colin Devroe:There's ad sales. There's, you know, partnerships and business development. And so, yeah, they are definitely real businesses. You know, saying that someone is a food blogger is very much a a badge of honor. Nice.
Colin Devroe:And they're they're larger many times, they're larger than you know, they might get excited about being on the Food Network website or something, but many of these people get more traffic than the Food Network does. So they are they're pretty big.
Steve Burge:So I can imagine what a a travel blogger does at the at large scale. They they publish their journeys. I've seen some of the people who might be publishing their journeys. They here's me in South America, in Morocco, in Southeast Asia. What does a a food blog look like at massive scale?
Steve Burge:I I presume it's more than just putting out recipes. Right? There's there's, there's a lot more content that a publisher can be putting out rather than simply being a a site for pasta recipes or a site for vegan recipes.
Colin Devroe:Yeah. I think many many started out with just sharing a recipe here and there. You know? Some of them would probably maybe they had a real specific interest in vegan recipes or particular cultural, you know, food or an ingredient even surrounding just sourdough or something like that. And they may have started out that way, but as they grew and as the Internet changed around them, you know, with the search engines having their own rules and with audiences moving here and there through the social web.
Colin Devroe:And so they've now kind of diversified their content publishing, whether it's just recipes on their website to many of them have their own applications. Obviously, they're on these different social media platforms, and each of those are being managed differently. Many of them publish books, podcasts, newsletters. So, yeah, they are they are a full breadth publishing company doing many, many different things a lot of times by the time they get as large as many of Nerd Press' customers are.
Steve Burge:Oh, I was going to ask about revenue, but I guess they've come across revenue from depending on the on the blog, from all sorts of different sources. They may have advertising on the podcast. They may have advertising in their newsletter. They may have a YouTube channels perhaps. Mhmm.
Steve Burge:Maybe events. I presume some of them have maybe membership areas to the site as well.
Colin Devroe:Yeah. And partnerships and, you know, whether that's brand advertisements, you know, brand partnerships. You can imagine someone that has a million or more followers on one of these social platforms. They could advertise a particular, you know, brand of product. If they're making food, it could be from a particular brand of ingredient, like, you know, depending on what they make, it could be just a flour or anything really, or a kitchen device.
Colin Devroe:You know, it could be a mixer or this or that. They have really had to get savvy with because because these opportunities are coming at them when they reach a certain scale as well. Some of them are going out there and finding these opportunities and and learning how to manage them. We talk to those two as well, and we try to actually help those with some of our experience with working with larger brands, but also what what we've heard from others. But then once they get to a certain size, you know, they're going to be approached, and they wanna be able to take advantage of those opportunities.
Colin Devroe:I remember
Steve Burge:maybe ten maybe longer than ten, fifteen years ago, I had a friend who was developing video technology for food bloggers, and it it never really took off. I think it was just too too early of an idea, but he was inventing clickable videos. So his idea was people would be this is almost like pre YouTube before it really took off. There'd be video technology where someone would be cooking and making something in the kitchen and then say, hey. Here's my blender.
Steve Burge:Click on this blender to buy the blender. Sure. Here's the food I'm using. Click on it. It's probably they're probably very nicely positioned to to put products in front of customers and have some nice partnerships.
Colin Devroe:Yep. And they have integrations with Instagram to do that too. If you notice, if you're on Instagram for more than a minute now, you'll see an ad a lot of times, or you you'll scroll by someone wearing a particular article of clothing, and you can tap right on the clothing and buy it and stuff. So, yeah, we're definitely in there.
Steve Burge:I need I to catch up with Instagram, I guess, and maybe tell my friend about it. Yeah. For sure. So you literally can is it a static ad that they have on Instagram or who
Colin Devroe:I I believe you do it with both video and and a static image, and you can just tap on the product. And, of course, they have to enable that, and you have to reach a certain scale to have those tools. But, yeah, you can you can shop. I see it all the time. You know?
Colin Devroe:I follow a lot of leather making, you know, brands on Instagram because I'm in the market right now for a new leather wallet. Mine's breaking down even though I've had it for many, many years. And once you search that one time, you're gonna get a lot of ads, of course. And most of those brands have it right there where you see the wallet, and you can just tap on it and buy it right right from it it it opens up a browser, but you're still right within the Instagram experience purchasing a a product.
Steve Burge:Oh, you're you're making me feel behind the times now. So this is all done inside in and this may be completely old hat to some people listening. But you can be inside Instagram and go through an Instagram based checkout. Yeah. The money will go through Instagram and then go to the the creator.
Colin Devroe:I I believe that you can use I mean, obviously, Meta has its own wallets and stuff too. I I I don't necessarily use those, so I don't know if they have that or not. But it certainly feels like it's just all part of one flow even if it is working off the person's website or not. But, yeah, you are maybe behind the times because I can tell you a lot of people have a lot of Instagram packages sitting on their front door, you know, because I I think it I think it works for sure. You you can see the product right there.
Colin Devroe:You don't have to go through a store and shop and add to cart and etcetera, etcetera. I mean, you just see the thing that you want, and you buy it right there. And I think a lot of people do that.
Steve Burge:So if you're a travel blogger, maybe you're you're a biker. You you have a blog about your bike adventures. You might be able to be able to sell bike parts this way. Certainly, clothes. Hey.
Steve Burge:This is the outfit I was wearing when I was on this journey. Click here to buy to buy this particular shirt. Okay. I I can see that being a really pretty awesome revenue stream for some of these creators, and, it it kinda leads on to the next question I had for you was about the the traffic. If you're getting up to millions of views a month on your travel blog or your food blog, Where's that traffic being generated from?
Steve Burge:I presume Google is still a fairly big portion of it, but is this a a very social industry where a large portion of the traffic comes from social sites?
Colin Devroe:I think it's probably different for most for every blogger, you know, depending on sometimes how they found their audience or where their audience first came from. You know? When when someone first gets started, it's probably the genesis of their of their traffic is probably pretty important. But Google is definitely still a lion's share of of many people's traffic, although the world's changing. AI is taking a lot of the searches away, so some search traffic is obviously going to change.
Colin Devroe:Maybe not go down, but just shift from one place to another. And so social does still play a very big part. We have many food bloggers that their recipes are shared a hundred thousand times on on different platforms or more. And so they have large audiences that still use these others these other platforms. And sometimes the main way that people interact with their content is through these social platforms.
Colin Devroe:So you can imagine you have a website and you're publishing recipes, but the main way that someone is consuming your content is through Flipboard in a magazine or through Pinterest on a Pinterest board. And because you've liked or repinned many of their recipes in the past, now Pinterest is, through their algorithm, showing you the new recipes that this person is publishing. So your main way of interacting with that person's content is through Pinterest. And there are hundreds of millions of Pinterest users and and hundreds of millions of Flipboard users. And, of course, any of the other social networks.
Colin Devroe:Facebook is still a a big generator of traffic as well.
Steve Burge:You keep mentioning Flipboard. And before we got on the started recording the podcast, you mentioned it a couple times as well. I've got a a wife and two daughters who are very active on Pinterest. Got lots of boards, but I'm not sure any of them have ever heard of Flipboard or use it. I remember vaguely from back in the day.
Steve Burge:What exactly is it? Why is it so strong? Why do you keep mentioning it as a big source of traffic?
Colin Devroe:Well, they're friends of ours. Maybe that's one reason why. Maybe I'm a little bit biased. But, and they're really big advocates for the federated web or the open web. Okay.
Colin Devroe:They've been diving into that a lot. Flipboard's been around a long time. It is and I don't speak for them, but the way I describe Flipboard to others is that it is like Pinterest, but instead of boards, you have magazines. And so people share into magazines. So you might have Steve's tech magazine or Steve's publishing magazine.
Colin Devroe:And you go and you find these different pieces of information and articles and images and videos, podcast episodes, and you're sharing those into Steve's publishing magazine. And people can follow that magazine. They can like specific articles that you have put into there. They they don't even have to follow your magazine, but the the individual articles can get shared. And there's many different mechanisms within the Flipboard ecosystem that allow you to do that.
Colin Devroe:Their experience and their UI on the iPad especially is very magazine like. So to go and flip through a food and travel and news is very big on Flipboard. And they do have well over a hundred million users as far as I know. They are one of the bigger, you know, one of the bigger traffic sites on the Internet. They're all into human curation, which I really appreciate about them compared to maybe some of the other platforms.
Colin Devroe:They definitely have an algorithm. The algorithm is based a lot on timeliness and some other things, but they def they value human curation. So they set up these editors, in house editors, to then curate the food, you know, vertical for them, the food market or the travel market. And so what ends up happening is it's not just feeding you a bunch of stuff through an algorithm. It is actually a human that's saying, wow.
Colin Devroe:You should go take a look at this because it's timely right now. And if you follow them on different social platforms, you'll see that they keep track of what's going on in the zeitgeist and, you know, what's going on in news and politics and celebrity and food news and things like that, and they promote that information through their their platform. And it obviously works because they drive a lot of traffic. We have many customers on the hubbub side, which we'll get into hubbub, I'm sure, but Nerd Press publishers that have ignored Flipboard have seen and then and then added it to their site. Let's say they add the Flipboard share button in Hubbub or or they just engage that audience themselves by by sharing the content on there or liking other things as their brand.
Colin Devroe:They do see a very stark rise in traffic from Flipboard. Wow. We have one that started to publish on there or rather share their information on there. You know? And within thirty days, they had 60,000 unique hits from from from Flipboard.
Colin Devroe:So Flipboard is definitely not platform to sleep on if you are a publisher.
Steve Burge:So they have a big differentiator in that they have human curation Mhmm. On their social network, and I'm struggling hard to think of any other network that does that. Maybe maybe Reddit has a dose of that because they have the moderators and Yeah. And so on, but doesn't sound like nearly the way the Flipboard does it. And, also, it sounds like the actual physical experience is different in that you're almost flipping through the pages of a magazine rather than the endless doom scrolling vertically.
Colin Devroe:Well, I I'm really into photography, and so I like to use Flipboard to follow photographic magazines. There's a few editors on there, photographic editors that I really appreciate their taste. And while I do follow some of these people on social media, some of the user interfaces in some of these apps that are, like, just threads or something, let's say, they're not a photo book. But when I'm on my iPad and I open up Flipboard and I go to my photography magazine that's being curated by someone that works at MoMA, it is very much like a printed magazine. And so in the realm of photography, that obviously makes a lot of sense.
Colin Devroe:And there are other things that are like that. We all really appreciate a really nice, well designed, well photographed cookbook compared to seeing a Facebook post. And so Flipboard, if you're into food and you really wanna see some of these recipes in a in a nice way or at least be able to page through them in a nice way. Pinterest does a decent job at that as well with highly visual boards and things. But Flipboard is definitely very, very nice for that.
Colin Devroe:And what's really nice for the publisher is unlike some other platforms, they don't keep the person on Flipboard. If someone taps on an article, you go to the website, And that maintains the relationship between Flipboard and all the publishers. That that allows people to grow their websites and to grow their reach because they aren't saying, oh, click here and read it here. Like, maybe an RSS reader would do that. A lot of the maybe reservations about people using RSS was that if you could read all my content through an RSS reader, you never have to come to my website.
Colin Devroe:Now that has proven not to be the way that it goes. RSS has become the underpinning of the entire Internet now from podcasting like this to, the Apple News app, etcetera, etcetera. But it is it does have someone kind of take away that that hit, which is kind of their currency. Right? They they make money based on traffic many times, and so Flipboard does a good job of redirecting that traffic.
Steve Burge:Yeah. There are some some social networks, I believe, Twitter slash x does it and LinkedIn as well, that they they will penalize a link in a post. But if you're
Colin Devroe:Sounds like the opposite of the web. Yes. It
Steve Burge:yeah. It's a terrible idea, basically. You have to put some kind of some kind of hook in the main post and then drop the link in the comments down below.
Colin Devroe:Well, it incentivizes bad behavior. It incentivizes behavior that's that's let's call it, reader hostile. Right? If I'm on threads and I follow someone like you and I trust that if you link me to something, that I wanna see it. Well, if then you are incentivized by the algorithm to post and then reply to your own post.
Colin Devroe:Now it's harder for me who wants to see your information, who wants to see your images, your links, whatever you're sharing. I don't think it's I think it's I don't think it's a long term good. I don't think it'll last forever. I think that'll go away like many other things that they that social networks that are siloed like that have tried. It does it does boost Facebook's numbers, but it doesn't boost the publisher's numbers.
Steve Burge:So you are the the social media person at Nerd Press to some extent. Right? You're heavily involved in that side of things, and you're developing a a plug in called Hubbub that Yep. Nerd Press has recently acquired. You've been spent a lot of time digging into, social networks for really prolific, high quality, highly successful publishers.
Steve Burge:What are you seeing out there at the moment? We're talking about a couple of niches in particular, the food and the travel niches. Are there sources of traffic out there? Are there social, particular social networks that are really driving traffic to your customers at the moment to you mentioned Flipboard, perhaps Instagram as well. Are there others that we haven't talked about yet?
Colin Devroe:Yeah. So I joined NerdPress, and I am the senior product manager at NerdPress. And my main responsibility right now is Hubbub, which is a website growth plug in for WordPress. So we are the Hubbub product is dedicated to growing someone's website and their mailing list. We think that it's very important at this time that we are in with the change in the social engine landscape, with the change in social media that is constant, that we give the publisher's growth our priority.
Colin Devroe:And so every change we make or tool that we create or feature we add to Hubbub is driven towards helping the publisher grow their website or their mailing list because we think it is very important for them to own their audience unlike on some of the social platforms where they don't own their audience. And if the social platform goes away, they lose their audience. We firmly believe that the publishers should own their audience, and so that's what Hubbub is kind of dedicated to. And when we acquired it, it already had a great foundation of customers, a great feature set for sharing and following on social platforms. So you could add social sharing buttons to your website to share on x or share on Facebook, and you could also add the follow buttons, which says, hey.
Colin Devroe:I have a Facebook page over here. Follow me there. Or I have an Instagram account. Follow me there. We've extended it since then.
Colin Devroe:We've added new social networks that didn't even exist when we acquired it, Blue Sky and Mastodon, etcetera. And so we're gonna continue to invest in, you know, supporting whatever social network comes next. We're we're kind of agnostic in that way. Like, we we you know, whatever is the so whatever social networks have some traction. In fact, we're we're looking at some that are mainly in Korea right now that we're gonna be adding just for that audience because we've had requests for that.
Colin Devroe:That social networks that maybe you or I would never even become aware of, and yet they have millions of people using them. And so we wanna make sure we support those as well. But also, we've added a new feature called save this, which is a form that goes into your post. And after this, maybe I'll record some video for you so you could see just some what some of these features do. But the save this form, you can imagine you're you're scrolling on a travel blog, and I just did this the other day.
Colin Devroe:Was a Hubbub customer. I didn't even know. My wife and I wanna go to Maine. We saw one of the Maine tourism websites that said things to do in Maine. It happens to use Hubbub and our save this feature.
Colin Devroe:I type my email address into one of the things to do. It sends it to my email, which
Steve Burge:That's always a which awesome feeling as a developer. Right? You come across someone using your own product.
Colin Devroe:In fact, I'm I'm creating a search engine that just uses NerdPress clients, and it's really nice because if I can we have we have a Flipboard magazine that's just NerdPress clients' recipes. Like so we we really like to
Steve Burge:Oh, okay.
Colin Devroe:Support our customers. But when I when I shared that to myself or saved it to myself, that one post about things to do in Maine, not only did it send it to my email address, but I was added to their mailing list. Oh, okay. So now the Maine tourism board or whatever organization it was is now able to grow their mailing list. And since we've launched this, I think we launched it in June, it has the conversion rates have been just through the roof because people are getting something as well as getting onto a mailing list.
Colin Devroe:And so that feature has exploded for us. We're really, really pleased with with how it's working. It's very customizable. We use it, in fact, when we go to events to give people discount codes and stuff too. So you type in your email address, you get a discount code for the product, but you're also added to our mailing list when you do it.
Colin Devroe:So there is a lot of really nice uses for it, and we're gonna be investing really heavily in improving that product over time. But your your question was, like, what is you converting, and what is what social networks are really sending traffic to our customers?
Steve Burge:Well, you kind of answered that question by saying people need to think outside the social networks, and they need to own their audience that Yeah. I I mentioned Instagram and Flipboard. Are there any more examples? And it seems as if your answer was newsletters.
Colin Devroe:Definitely newsletters. We like, I I think I stressed this, but we do think it's very important for our customers to own their audience. For a long time, the the relationship between the audience and the and the publisher was very passive, very ephemeral. You know, they come to the website one time because they did a Google search, they may never come back again, or maybe they come back again in two months. But to convert that into an engaged relationship, whether that's through a newsletter, through social media, through them buying your book, etcetera, the the only way you could do that is if you have that relationship with them.
Colin Devroe:And if you grew an Instagram following to a million followers, not only are you now subject to how you share with that million followers on Instagram, which we all know, even those of us that don't have a million followers know, that if I share an image on Instagram, the likelihood of all my followers seeing it these days is near zero. Only a very small percentage of your followers will actually ever see that image in their timeline because of Meta's business decisions. But if you own the customer, whether that means that you have a newsletter with them, you're engaged on Patreon, whatever it may be, that relationship is much tighter, not as passive, much more engaged, and you can almost guarantee that that person's going to see that bit of content that you're giving to them. And so that leads to a much higher or more valuable audience. So 1,000,000 Instagram followers is worth less than 10,000 newsletter subscribers.
Colin Devroe:So if you're thinking about just raw numbers, if you can grow your newsletter mailing list and have your open rate for those newsletters be fairly high or industry high, that is far more valuable than as many social media followers as you could possibly And one of the the some light at the end of the social media tunnel right now is these open and federated platforms like Mastodon, like Blue Sky, and others that are allowing you to own your following. So unlike Facebook, if you get a million Blue Sky followers, you can take those followers with you if you were to leave Blue Sky or Mastodon. And so that's what separates some of these newer social media platforms from the previous generation of social media platforms, which is why threads which is made by Meta or Facebook, which is why threads is actively pursuing some of these open protocols is because they see that that's where it's going to go, where if I create or or if I find a million followers on one of these platforms, I should be able to take that with me because I earned it. And so that's kind of what's really exciting about the social web right now.
Steve Burge:So I feel like I should know more about this. I've been very active on Blue Sky lately. I have a a Mastodon account. But, for me and for other people listening, they may not quite understand the practical implications of that. How would that work if you decide, okay.
Steve Burge:I'm on Blue Sky. I have an audience of 50,000 people, and I want to move. What would what would that process look like? You want to move, say, to threads or to a Mastodon account? How would that work?
Colin Devroe:So each of these is a it's a little bit nuanced and a little bit technical, and we're very early days in this. Okay. I would say it's actually easier to talk about Mastodon from this perspective because Blue Sky is very new. Their protocol is just getting under feet. Okay.
Colin Devroe:Whereas Mastodon's been around for eleven years or whatever it's been. And the activity pub protocol, which is underneath Mastodon, has been around even longer. But just to kind of paint the picture of how this could work is you you get a million Blue Sky followers, and you want to move to another social network that supports the same protocols that Blue Sky does. Now Blue Sky probably could give you a download of all your followers, whatever that may mean. You know, you download some data and you can get that information, which in and of itself is useful.
Colin Devroe:Unlike some of the other social media platforms, maybe there's no way to do that. But if you were to move from one platform to another, the followers would never know the difference. And you are already on that other platform, and they are still following you. So the connection is never broken. Right?
Colin Devroe:So you can imagine you can imagine this. If you have a an address book of, you know, a million people in your address book, and they all know your email address, and you know their email address, and you can email them anytime you want. And you're at your own domain name. Right? Steve dot com.
Colin Devroe:If you change email providers from your Internet provider to Gmail to Fastmail to somebody else, they'd never know that. They never know that you changed your email provider because email all works together.
Steve Burge:Okay.
Colin Devroe:So you change your email provider, and yet those people can still email you at the exact same address. You can email them at the exact same address, and they never knew that you switched email providers. That's where the protocols are going. It's getting closer and closer and closer to being as simple as that. Where right now, if I switched from Mastodon.social, which is where my Mastodon account is, over to pixelfed.social, which is another Instagram alternative, I can move all of my followers over there.
Colin Devroe:They would never even know. So that's where the the protocols are headed. It's very exciting because I do believe that there's been a lot of wasted energy, not necessarily wasted, of course, but, like, it's it's unfortunate when the seas change and and people move from one platform to another or a platform goes out of business or a platform changes their policies such that that publisher no longer wants to publish there. So now they're they're going to be able to move and keep their their audience with them.
Steve Burge:Oh, so you you're thinking maybe two, three, possibly four years ahead. For example, I on my Blue Sky account, I have a domain, steveberge.com, where I do some blogging, and that allowed me to Blue Sky allowed me to connect that particular domain name to my account and use it as my handle. So that's something that I could take with me between different platforms and would allow people to follow me whatever. If they were, say, on threads, they could possibly see my messages using that unique handle that worked across different platforms?
Colin Devroe:Yeah. One of one of Blue Sky's biggest thing is about identity. And you own your identity, and you own your identity at your domain name. And so your domain name then becomes your username sort of. And the way that you authenticate is through your own domain.
Colin Devroe:And so now that that's your domain, as long as you have that domain, you should be able to have that connection no matter what platform you're on. Quite frankly, you should be able to be on a hundred platforms, and your domain is the target for all of them. And that is starting we're starting to see that. We started with verified links. Right?
Colin Devroe:There was always this or even verified accounts. Right? You go to Meta, you give them $15 a month, and you can get a verified account. You go to x, you could do the same thing. Well, if you go to Mastodon, the way that you verify it is that you connect it to your domain name through a little snippet of text that goes on to your website.
Colin Devroe:And then it gives you a little green check mark check mark, and you can say, oh, that really is Colin because that's his website, and it has a check mark on it. And the only way that that would ever happen is because he edited his website. And Blue Sky is
Steve Burge:similar needed.
Colin Devroe:Yeah. No $15 needed. So then now you're able to verify who NASA is across all of these platforms or who the White House is across all these platforms. Okay. And so, really, it shouldn't be that everybody has different usernames and all these other things.
Colin Devroe:It should all be driven by domain names, and eventually, we'll get there.
Steve Burge:You so you are a big supporter of the decentralized web. And from having browsed your website before talking with you, I didn't realize that you are an original OG blogger. I mean, we're not talking like 02/2015 or 02/2005. You got, like, blog posts going back to the nineteen nineties.
Colin Devroe:I do. You you've been
Steve Burge:in this. You've been passionate about this for a long time.
Colin Devroe:Gray that apparent, Steve. You know? We're both a little gray, but yeah. Yes. So I if if my memory is right, I would say it was probably around 1997 is when I started sharing Star Wars information online on my Prodigy account or something along those lines or tripod, if anybody remembers those.
Colin Devroe:GeoCities, things like that. I definitely was sharing daily snippets before it was the the word weblog was coined long before RSS. I remember when the RSS consortium came together and created the spec for RSS. Yeah. So I I've definitely been doing it for a very long time.
Colin Devroe:If you look at my wordpress.org profile, I think it started in 02/2004. Okay. Something like that. So it's it's way back. I've been part of the blogging scene for quite some time, and I've seen it change.
Colin Devroe:And I can say one thing has not changed the entire time, and that is the importance of having your own website. My personal website is a place where I experiment and play and where I think. So it doesn't have a purpose. I'm not trying to make any money with it. Nothing like that.
Colin Devroe:But it's where I play with the latest tools or software or WordPress feature or run beta versions of my own plugins or something like that. And then it's also where I formulate my own thinking. So the reason why I write on my own site is just to see what I actually think about something. I may start writing about the state of AI. And what are what are my thoughts on AI?
Colin Devroe:Well, let me start writing about that. And by the time I get to the end or go through the editing process of, you know, thinking about that, I may change my own mind because I really wanna be able to articulate the way I think about AI right now or the state of it. And so that has helped me over my career in formulating my opinions, changing my opinions, and then, of course, reading other people's blogs, which I read many blogs every day in in NetNewswire on my Mac. And I keep up to date with many blogs to hopefully craft an opinion to change my opinion. I follow a lot of people that I disagree with to kinda make sure I'm getting bits of information from everywhere.
Steve Burge:Two things strike me having learned more about you over the the course of getting ready for this podcast and talking with you. One is that your blog, your site reflects a really interesting degree of experimentation, kind of a almost like an old school attitude of trying things. You got photography up there, interests stuff about your hobbies, your thoughts, just kind of a curiosity about different different things you can do online. So there's that real sense of of curiosity. And then the other thing is optimism.
Steve Burge:You still seem, after thirty years of being online, quite a lot of people have have got burned out, have got pessimistic. You you seem optimistic that that the web that the open source web will continue to get better over the next few years.
Colin Devroe:Yeah. Well, that's nice of you to say. I'm glad that you come away from my sight thinking that I'm optimistic. So that's good. I appreciate that.
Colin Devroe:Yeah. I you know, because I haven't seen it go the other way, to be honest with you. Bad ideas tend to not make it too far. I mean, unfortunately, human nature, there's been a lot of bad ideas, and some of them have had some success, but they don't last very long even though there's been detrimental results. But on the web, you know, some of the best things, the the most decentralized, the most federated things have made it the entire time.
Colin Devroe:Right? The web itself is decentralized and federated. It is the protocols that win out over time rather than specific implementations of them. So TCPIP and SMTP and RSS and HTTP, these things will live forever more than likely. They may be replaced, but they will be supported for literally ever.
Colin Devroe:Open source, I think, is very important part of the entire ecosystem that there is open source software or or at least open source choices. And so, yeah, I think that overall, what will win, not the closed minded or the siloed services or anything that's user hostile. I just don't think that it has a long term life. It may seem success some success. It may make someone a billionaire, but overall, I don't think that it will.
Colin Devroe:Forty years from now, we won't be talking about them, or forty years from now, they won't be a pivotal piece of the Internet or something.
Steve Burge:That's an awesome thought to end with. And I got one one other positive way that we can wrap this up, and that's the question we give to everyone we have on the podcast. It's a a blog roll question, we call it. If if you could pick one publisher that you're really excited about at the moment, someone who's when their newsletter arrives in your inbox or when you see their their names scroll past in your RSS feed, is there a publisher that's doing really awesome work right now whose work you're excited to read?
Colin Devroe:Yes. And so the Internet's a big place. So, Steve, I'm sorry. I can't pick just one, so I'm gonna have to pick a few. So Bartaj, I and I do not know Polish enough to probably say this person's last name.
Colin Devroe:Bartaj C, I'll say, but definitely I don't know if you have show notes for your videos, but please look at at this at Bartaj's site. If you you've probably seen some of his work in the past. I put in our studio chat here, so if you wanted to look at it, Steve. He'll he'll publish something just about the bicycle, but then goes deep on exactly how a bicycle works with infographics and interactive tools and and widgets to play with to show, like, how does the weight of the human on top of the bike impact the he has one on the moon, on gravity, etcetera, etcetera. It's super, super, super in-depth, unbelievable blog posts that I can't even imagine how long it must have taken him to even write them, let alone create the the tools to to do it.
Colin Devroe:Another one is Julia Evans. She covers kind of her own technology curiosities. Right? If she doesn't understand something, she writes a book about it or at least a a small little PDF about it. So if she doesn't understand let's say she doesn't really grok how Git works, right, the the source control software, g I t, Git.
Colin Devroe:She dives deep and figures out exactly how it works and then is able to explain it either through a blog post or through a a a inexpensive $8 zine or something. And that has really informed her her content on her website, and her website's great for learning stuff like that. Molly White, many people she has a couple different websites, but her main website is pretty inspirational. Not only is she uncovering and documenting some of the worst stuff that happens in crypto, She also does it in a cool way with her own website where she built her own tooling to syndicate all of her content across all the platforms, and she she shares what she reads and etcetera, etcetera. And her website is really a I think it's open source as well.
Colin Devroe:I think she shares all of her source on GitHub for her website. So if you ever wanted to know, like, if I publish on my blog, how do I get it to Blue Sky and to Mastodon and to here and to there and everything? Her site kinda shows you ways that she does that. Simon Collison, just a really cool site where he he makes his own music. He has his own art.
Colin Devroe:He's a designer. It's a very personal blog, but the homepage is really cool with, like, a timeline of his life and stuff. And there are many personal blogs like that that I follow that are just kind of inspirational. Like, when you said that you look at my website and you see that it's full of curiosity and optimism and stuff, I know my personal website is a mess because it I'm a mess maybe. I don't know.
Colin Devroe:But I don't It's in progress.
Steve Burge:Don't think on it.
Colin Devroe:Yeah. It's and it never won't be in progress, my personal website. Whereas maybe someone else is there. They wanna get to a certain state. I don't care if you go there and it's broken.
Colin Devroe:It might be broken later today because I did something to it, and that's okay to me. And then the last one is Simon Willison. He has been covering AI and these the the LLM models better than anybody out there right now. As far as I know, if anybody else knows any other ones, I'd love to hear them. But he tests every new AI model that comes out and documents them profusely and writes software against them and everything, and he shares everything on his blog.
Colin Devroe:He's probably blogging multiple times per day, and it has been a real a real valuable resource to me.
Steve Burge:Well, so I guess the key takeaway I've had from talking with you is that blogging is not dead, that there are successful multimedia empires built on blogging. Those people are proud to be called bloggers, and there's a a network of bloggers blogging frequently with an enormous detail, and you're proud to be a part of that. Absolutely. Awesome. Well, awesome.
Steve Burge:Thank you so much, Colin.
Colin Devroe:Thank you.