I’ve been using the Plaud NotePin for a while now. I wear it around my neck like a lanyard. It’s a pretty stylish-looking device, so it doesn’t tend to draw attention to itself. I wear it on my wisdom walks. It’s an easy way for me to walk and capture my notes hands-free. And because it has a 20-hour battery life, I can just record and forget about it. I probably look like a bit of a madman walking and talking to myself. But that’s OK.
And then when I get home, Plaud converts into an MP3, and I upload that into Google’s new local, offline voice app called Eloquence, which is powered by Gemma. I can record my wisdom walks without having to remember to push the record button, and I lose the self-consciousness that naturally occurs when you know you’re being recorded. The hands-free, always-on mode makes it easy for me to resist the temptation to perform.
Today is the first of July. I have my weighted rucksack on. The sun is shining. The air is still cool and crisp. It feels like a great day to start a new challenge.
A 31-day blogging challenge, to be exact.
But not the kind of blogging you may have been conditioned to think of. You know, the copywriter clickbait titles, the niche topics, the calls to action, the categories, the big ideas, the SEO standards, and the essays that feel compelled to say something clever. The posts that need to justify their existence before I’ve even written a word, and all of the rest of that you may have become brainwashed into believing a blog should be.
Consider these 31 days an open rebellion against all of that.
At the risk of sounding nostalgic, for these 31 days my intention is to lean into a much older word—the weblog.
You know, that mythological beast where people used to log their journey across the web, leaving hyperlink trails that you could follow and experience the wonders of the World Wide Web, not the locked-down, walled gardens of the platforms. You know the ones I’m talking about.
For this 31-day expedition, I want to pick up the trail where the World Wide Web stopped being about self-expression and started being about content and conformity and bowing down to the algorithm gods. Bring back the old gods, Hermes, Athena, the Muses, Saraswati, and Brigid.
Yes, the 31 days will be about the web, but it will also be about my wanderings through books, through walks, and through the inside of my own head.
The flow is simple.
Leave a trail. Drop links. Mark where I’ve been. Note what I saw. Point toward what caught my attention. Let someone else follow the hyperlink trail if they want to, or wander off in their own direction.
A pirate’s map. That’s what springs to mind. I’m making a pirate’s map of lots of little X marks scattered across the web.
That’s a more natural shape for me than the big essay machine. I like essays, of course. I’ll still write them. But not every thought has to become one. Some thoughts are field notes. Some are fragments. Some are just a sentence that wants to sit there and glow for a bit.
The walking is part of it too. That came through again this morning.
I’ve spent so much time trying to find the right system. The right practice. The right name. The right workflow. The right relationship between the vault, the blog, the notes, the audio, the AI, the field notes, the public garden, and the private underground. I can tie myself in knots trying to get the practice ready.
But the simple thing is still the simple thing.
I wander. I wonder. I document.
That’s it.
Put the shoes on. Put some weight in the pack. Get outside. Let the body move. Let the mind loosen. Say what comes. Notice what’s there. Record the wild thought if it passes through.
Take a picture:
Feel the pack getting heavier on the hill. Feel the cold sweat on my back when I get home.
That is the practice. Not the idea of the practice. Not the perfect version of the practice. The practice itself.
If walking is how I move through physical space, then weblogging is how I move through cyberspace.
A proper weblog is a trace of movement through the network. It says, I came through here. I noticed this. I followed this link. I read this fragment. I disagreed with this. I carried this sentence with me for a while. I left a marker. I made a path where there wasn’t one before.
In physical space, the walker has roads, footpaths, desire lines, bridleways, alleyways, fields, thresholds, gates, benches, pubs, rivers, hedgerows, ruins, weather, strangers, dogs, and the feel of the ground underfoot.
In cyberspace, the weblogger has hyperlinks, archives, feeds, tabs, bookmarks, blogrolls, search trails, old forums, RSS, comments, backlinks, screenshots, quotations, fragments, source notes, rabbit holes, dead links, resurfaced pages, and the strange little shimmer of finding an old human-made page still glowing in the dark.
The hyperlink is the footpath.
The tab is the open gate.
The bookmark is the cairn.
The blogroll is the old map pinned by the door.
The feed is the river, but you have to be careful, because if you stop walking and just let it carry you, you’re no longer traveling. You’re drifting.
I suppose that’s the link I’m starting to see. Walking is how I think through physical space. Weblogging is how I think through cyberspace.
In the street, I leave footprints. On the web, I leave links.
Thirty-one days of footprints and links. Thirty-one days of field notes, fragments, wanderings, readings, recordings, old-web logging, new-web experiments, and whatever else the trail decides to offer.
No grand system.
No perfect launch.
No polished content calendar.
Just a man with a rucksack, a recorder, a blog, and a desire to leave better traces.
Let’s see where the trail goes.
