On the theme of informal blogging, I thought I would try writing posts using audio. I use Day One, which is a personal journal app, and I actually use that daily and am on a streak of nearly 1,500 days posting to it in a row. It's an app that I have on my phone and has proven to be a really easy way to make notes every day for myself. So I guess it’s similar to the type of informal blogging I was talking about the other day with both Leaflet in 2026 and Radio Userland in 2003.

Day One has an audio function, which I have very rarely used. But I thought it would be a good way to test doing a blog post, since it provides an excellent transcript of the audio. So I will copy and paste that into Leaflet.

So, as a counter to informal blogging, you may know that I also run an Internet history blog called Cybercultural. But that takes a lot of work, actually. Recently, until I lost my job [in mid-February], I was doing one article per week on Cybercultural, but I’ve kind of put that on pause for now, while I’m trying to pivot my career and basically just find an income again. For some reason, writing Cybercultural just feels a bit overwhelming with everything going on, so I’ve put it on pause and it’s part of the reason I’m now using Leaflet — because it’s much less effort to write posts. I just want a very light blogging model so that I can put my thoughts out into the world, but not feel stressed about it.

Also, as I mentioned the other day, 'light blogging' is not like microblogging, where you’re firing off takes and trying to be funny, or pushing peoples buttons and being controversial, and all that. I don’t wanna do any of that, I just wanna have a forum that’s informal and where I can share my thoughts and work through my thoughts, and that was what blogging was great for in 2003-04. Blogging then was like a community of people and you just sort of put stuff out into the ether and people would comment on it and trackback.

Leaflet is promising in that regards, although unfortunately comments and trackbacks aren’t entirely integrated with Bluesky at this point — which I think it really needs in order to take the next step. But that’s probably something the Leaflet and Bluesky teams have to work out amongst themselves. The promise is there with the Atmosphere to do that kind of stuff; ideally I’d love to do blog post like this and have people comment here and it turns up as a post and notification on Bluesky, then any discussion on Bluesky ends up back on my Leaflet, etc. Hopefully we get there at some point.

But in the meantime, this is an experiment. I’m actually just about to make my breakfast and I’m doing an audio note in Day One and I’ll transfer that into Leaflet and hopefully it just takes about 10 or 15 minutes and it’s done. If I get into a habit of doing that every day or every second day or whatever, then I will be quite happy with that. In fact, I’d probably do that more than posting to Bluesky, because I like blogging and I like expanding on thoughts, working through things that I’m thinking about by doing a blog post. So we’ll see how it goes.

P.s. (writing this bit): tbh it took me longer than 10 minutes to edit. Turns out I say "you know" a lot when I'm talking; also, I tweaked some of what I said to make it read better. Anyway, putting this lightly edited post out into the Atmosphere now!