There’s a minor stir on the internet today, about the Signal v Noise blog leaving Medium and coming home to WordPress.
If you’ve not heard of it, that’s the blog for the founders of Basecamp, David Heinemeier Hansson (@DHH) and Jason Fried, and they’ve written a number of business books as well, notably Rework, which I highly recommend. I’ve been following their stuff for a long time, and it’s great (I don’t use Basecamp; their value proposition just isn’t there for the price for me).
But they’re a big deal in terms of online businesses, and they’ve served as a voice for intentionally small businesses a few times.
And now they’re coming back to WordPress. Here’s why, in DHH’s words:
Writing for us is not a business, in any direct sense of the word. We write because we have something to say, not to make money off page views, advertisements, or subscriptions. If some readers end up signing up for Basecamp, that’s great. But if they just like to read and not buy, that’s also great.
Beyond that, though, we’ve grown ever more aware of the problems with centralizing the internet. Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.
David Heinemeier Hansson
It’s nice to own your content and be able to do what you like. On this site, for me that’s meant going back to basics a bit and running what amounts to a default theme for a little while to force myself to focus on content and not on constantly restyling the site.
I haven’t really seen it yet, but I think it’s likely this will be part of a larger trend as people decide to go back to blogging – and back, more specifically, to the sort of blog where people really own their own content.
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