There’s an interesting discussion going on in the Elezea Community about “Product Principles”. What they are for, when you need them, how they can be made more useful, etc. A couple examples given are Intercom’s set of guidelines for making decisions, Dan Ritz’s interface design values and my own company’s values.

The biggest challenge I see with principles like these is figuring out how to make them specific enough to help us make decisions. The further I get into reading Good Strategy, Bad Strategy the more I realize how much we tend to hide behind nice words, when in most cases those nice words don’t actually change our behavior in any meaningful way. For example:

Bad strategy is not the same thing as no strategy or strategy that fails rather than succeeds. Rather, it is an identifiable way of thinking and writing about strategy that has, unfortunately, been gaining ground. Bad strategy is long on goals and short on policy or action. It assumes that goals are all you need. It puts forward strategic objectives that are incoherent and, sometimes, totally impracticable. It uses high-sounding words and phrases to hide these failings.

I fear that “product principles” are prone to be made up almost exclusively of “fluff”:

Fluff is superficial restatement of the obvious combined with a generous sprinkling of buzzwords. Fluff masquerades as expertise, thought, and analysis. A hallmark of true expertise and insight is making a complex subject understandable. A hallmark of mediocrity and bad strategy is unnecessary complexity—a flurry of fluff masking an absence of substance.

I think product principles, in particular, need to be detailed and specific enough so that they affect day-to-day decision making. This is similar to how we should use Personas (and why so many people hate Personas). If you just put a Persona’s face on a coffee mug, that’s not going to be very useful. But if you’re able to say, “this feature would be useful for a persona that’s not in our target market so we’re not going to build it”, that’s an entirely different story.

Which leads me to wonder if what we call “product principles” should rather just be the combination of a well-defined design system and content strategy. HelpScout’s Style Guide immediately comes to mind as a good example of this. Because what are “Product Principles” for if they don’t help us make product decisions?

Do you have thoughts to add on this topic? Join the community.

Despite its ridiculous name I’ve become quite fond of the POSSE movement (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere). It’s pretty easy to hook up and automate, so I’ll just mention the basics (and then move on to the problem child):

• RSS through FeedPress (they’re awesome).
• FeedPress pushes each post to the site’s Twitter account.
• IFTTT watches the RSS feed and pushes each post to LinkedIn.

I can add more things through IFTTT, but I think that’s all I need for now. Except for Medium. I really didn’t know what to do with Medium, especially considering this and this:

2015 was the year of Medium and Newsletters, but I feel like we should use 2016 to Make The Personal Blog Great Again™.

— Rian Van Der Merwe (@RianVDM) January 2, 2016

But then it dawned on me… Indie publishers have been thinking about Medium all wrong. We’ve been thinking about Medium as a thing that eats all the world’s content with zero regard for publishers. But Medium is, in fact, nothing more than a next-generation RSS reader. You can follow people and publications, and presumably things will then show up in your feed (it’s all a little confusing to me). That’s when I realized that I should treat Medium not as a publishing platform but as an RSS platform just like Google Reader (may it rest in peace) or Feedly.

So back I went to IFTTT, and did this:

Now every post on this site will automatically appear on Medium as well. So I guess my point is that if Medium is your RSS reader of choice, you can now subscribe to Elezea on Medium here.

Buried somewhere in the middle of Will Oremus’s article about Twitter’s decision to increase the 140-character limit we find this important paragraph:

What’s really changing here, then, is not the length of the tweet. It’s where that link at the bottom takes you when you click on it—or, rather, where it doesn’t take you. Instead of funneling traffic to blogs, news sites, and other sites around the Web, the “read more” button will keep you playing in Twitter’s own garden.

I’m nowhere near up to date or involved enough in the Open Web movement, but I’ve been writing this site since 2009 and since 6 years is a lot of time to invest in something, I do have Opinions on the matter. Hence one of the first things I tweeted this year:

2015 was the year of Medium and Newsletters, but I feel like we should use 2016 to Make The Personal Blog Great Again™.

— Rian Van Der Merwe (@RianVDM) January 2, 2016

The tweet prompted some interesting discussion, including links to a couple of excellent articles about Medium: Matthew Butterick’s The billionaire’s typewriter and Mandy Brown’s Ferengi (thanks for sending those, Chris!). There’s no need for me to reiterate their arguments here, except to say that this move to proprietary platforms—from Medium to Instant Articles to now Twitter’s entry to long-form publishing—seems to be a dangerous threat to the Open Web.

There are the political arguments around access and inequality that are all very valid, but I want to focus on another aspect here: content platforms as shortcuts. One of the main reasons for writing on a platform like Medium or Twitter or Facebook, as opposed to your own site, is that it’s supposed to give you easier access to a huge audience. And this is no small thing, because building an audience on your own site is, as far as I know, statistically impossible.

Okay, maybe that’s being a bit dramatic. But I’ll tell you that after 6 years of trying to do it I was exhausted and had to take a bit of a break recently. Now, you could argue that the reason I don’t have a huge following on this site is simply that my writing sucks, and you probably won’t be too far off track there. Yet I’d like to think that there’s more to it than that. Building an audience is just really hard because people have to seek out your content, and the truth is that most of the time nobody wants to read your shit.

But I digress. The point is that publishing on Medium and Twitter and Facebook gives you an immediate shortcut to a huge audience, but of course those companies’ interests are in themselves, not in building your audience, so it’s very easy for them to change things around in a way that totally screws you over (remember Zynga? Yeah, me either).

All this to say that I think it’s time we bring blogging and personal sites back. Some of my favorite sites are the ones that give me a glimpse into everything a person is interested in (I think my current favorite is Josh Ginter’s understated and eclectic The Newsprint). It’s a way to get to know someone through their interests, and to learn a bunch of things along the way. So I invite you not just to follow along here as I expand into topics beyond design and technology1, but to start your own personal blog up again if you’ve been neglecting it for a while. I’m really interested in the things you are passionate about. I want to learn from you. But don’t just do it for me, do it for you. Because it turns out there is an immense power in avoiding shortcuts and instead doing things the long, hard, stupid way.

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1. Fair warning: I’m a little rusty… ↩

Two recent articles made me think again about how weird journalism and publishing has become because of the internet and social media. In Instagram’s TMZ Jenna Wortham describes a very successful celebrity gossip “site” (what should we call these things now?) that exists primarily on Instagram:

Angie explained to me that Instagram perfectly suited her vision for The Shade Room: image-centric and interactive. For her purposes, Instagram was the equivalent of WordPress. When she started the feed a year ago, her goal was to accumulate 10,000 followers in the first year. She accomplished that in only two weeks. Angie started by posting about people at the bottom of the celebrity hierarchy (minor reality stars, mostly) and worked her way up to bigger names, building her loyalties slowly. Eventually, readers started sending her tips and videos via Instagram’s direct-messaging feature. Now, The Shade Room has more than half a million followers on Instagram alone.

Of course, this “business” is one decision by Instagram away from total collapse, but for now it’s an amazing success story.

The second article continues the media’s fascination with Buzzfeed. From Adrienne LaFrance and Robinson Meyer long and very interesting The Eternal Return of BuzzFeed:

BuzzFeed is a successful company. And it is not only that: BuzzFeed is the rare example of a news organization that changes the way the news industry works. While it may not turn the largest profits or get the biggest scoops, it is shaping how other organizations sell ads, hire employees, and approach their work. BuzzFeed is the most influential news organization in America today because the Internet is the most influential medium—and, in some crucial ways, BuzzFeed demonstrates an understanding of that medium better than anyone else.

And this:

Culturally, economically, even politically: BuzzFeed is so influential because it is still in ascendance. We don’t yet know how big this publication will get, how sweeping and lasting its effects on the American media sphere will be. “We’re still really small,” Peretti insists. “You have Disney and Viacom and Time Warner—the really big media companies are giant compared to us.” But BuzzFeed’s growth has been relentless in recent years. It shows no signs of slowing. Peretti is deliberately and aggressively building his company to be big. “The Internet isn’t for small companies,” he said last year.

It’s hard not to admire the way Buzzfeed understands how the internet hive mind works. Let’s not forget that they were the first publication to figure out what the internet is really for:

Robinson Meyer reflects on Medium and What Blogging Has Become:

And I too, a lowly twentysomething, pine for days of less centralization. As I wrote a few days ago, in a New Medium-style short post, “I still find the idea of a diverse blogosphere — arrayed across tens of thousands of URLs, with sites organized by author and shaped by distinctive interests — really, distinctively, unavoidably cool.”

But is there a place in the web ecosystem for this kind of writing anymore? And is the cost of using Medium, which will centralize writing and create a kind of publisher/publishee power inequality, worth the ease? What will happen when widespread abuse comes to Medium, the way it’s come to Twitter? And social media companies have proven tremendously malleable, product-wise, to the desires of other companies — will Medium be the same? What does a piece of advertising look like on Medium anyway, when the line between journalism and PR on it is already so thin?

I’ve been around long enough for Blogger to rise (and fall), for MySpace to be the best (and then the worst) place to write your thoughts, and for Posterous and Windows Live Spaces to disappear (along with all my posts there). So I will stubbornly hold on to writing on this here, my very own URL.