Archive of posts with tag 'newsletters'

On Legibility — In Society, Tech, Organizations, and Cities

April 6, 2021 • #

This is a repost from my newsletter, Res Extensa, which you can subscribe to over on Substack. This issue was originally published in November, 2020.

In our last issue, we’d weathered TS Zeta in the hills of Georgia, and the dissonance of being a lifelong Floridian sitting through gale-force winds in a mountain cabin. Last week a different category of storm hit us nationwide in the form of election week (which it seems we’ve mostly recovered from). Now as I write this one, Eta is

Res Extensa

September 29, 2020 • #

I’ve finally joined the newsletter club! Today I sent out the first issue of a new project, a bi-weekly email newsletter called Res Extensa.

My intent right now is for the newsletter to be a less-frequent companion to the blog, with some highlights of recent things I’ve been reading, writing, or interested in.

Res Extensa

As I wrote in the email, I once had an RSS-to-email setup using Mailchimp, for folks who wanted to subscribe to the blog without RSS. It’s a bit clunky, and since I started the daily...

Newsletters, Bundles, and Indie Publishing

August 14, 2020 • #

In his latest issue of The Diff, Byrne Hobart looks the economic models behind the boom in independent publishing and unbundling of analysis and journalism happening on platforms like Substack:

Bundles tend to grow until they reach a highly profitable mature state—at which point any change in the underlying audience, or the availability of competing products, seriously weakens their economics. The bigger a bundle gets, the more likely it is that a subset of users are all paying for basically one piece of the bundle, which could be...

Weekend Reading: Disintermediating Media, Boring Tech, and DIY Lights

July 25, 2020 • #

📨 Disintermediating the media with… Substack?

Jerry Brito writes about the growth of independent writing on Substack, prompted by a Mike Solana tweet:

From a technical perspective, Substack does not belong on Solana’s list next to Bitcoin and Signal. Signal is a company, but they have almost no information about their users—no names, no messages. Bitcoin is not a company, but instead a permissionless decentralized network, and “it” can’t decide who can use it or for what. Substack, on the other hand, is a centralized service that permissions who’s allowed on and...