People and Blogs

TL;DR: I'm starting a new weekly series called "People and Blogs" where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. You can subscribe to the newsletter or follow it here on the blog and via RSS. The first interview will go up on September 1st and I'll post a new one each Friday.

Over the years, I started a lot of side projects: a web inspiration gallery, a list of all the things I owned, a directory of space related Twitter accounts to follow, and many, many others. All of them were interesting, but none of them produced the level of excitement I'm feeling right now for my upcoming People and Blogs.

The idea for this series/side project popped into my head a few weeks ago while I was reading about the concept of Ikigai. I realised that what I really love to do is to write, to read what other people write, and to interact with people online. And the tools I use to achieve all this are emails and blogs. I write on mine, I read what others write on theirs, and I get to interact with them and with the people who read my content via email. So why not combine everything I love into a simple and fun project? That is how People and Blogs came to be.

What really excites me about this project is that it only has upsides. I get the chance to interact with people via email which is something I always enjoy doing. They get an opportunity to talk about things they care about, promote their sites, and share anything else they have going on in their lives. You will discover new and interesting people to follow. And finally, over time, we'll all get an amazing directory of personal blogs. I'm genuinely very excited about all this.

The goal for this project is to keep up the pace for at least a year. 52 weeks, 52 people, 52 blogs. Should be doable but only time will tell.

A few words on costs and monetisation

Like any other project on the web there are costs attached and ways to monetise it. As you probably know, I don't monetise my blog. I don't have ads, don't have affiliate links. My blog doesn't cost much to run so I can just pay for it. But running this newsletter series might add a few costs because sending emails can become expensive depending on how many people sign up. The plan is to rely on donations. I'm not going to include affiliate links on the interviews, I'm not going to run analytics anywhere. I care about your privacy and also I care about business models that are honest and upfront. So it's gonna be donations as the first option and potentially sponsors as a backup plan. But we'll see how it goes. Maybe none of you care about this series and I'll just shut it down in 12 months.

As I wrote before, my dream is to be able to spend my time helping people going online with their blogs and discover that there are better ways to inhabit the web, and so it would honestly be amazing if this series helped me get there.

Wrapping up

To recap: People and Blogs, 1st interview is coming out on September 1st. Sign up for the newsletter (powered by Buttondown) or add the RSS feed to your reader. If you want to support this endeavour, you can do it here.