Photo — — 80 words

Walking

"Did you know that in Edinburgh, there are more statues of dogs than there are of women?"

“Did you know that in Edinburgh, there are more statues of dogs than there are of women?”

From Message from the Skies, the virtual walking tour run in Edinburgh during January.

The story for the walking tour was written by Val McDermid, and celebrated the work of Edinburgh’s literary women, many of whom are unsung compared to the men.

Message from the Skies at Greyfriars Kirkyard

The walking tour ended in Greyfriars Kirkyard, where these spectacular neon signs ensured that women writers had their name in lights.

Linknote — — 193 words

Business — Web

An ode to writing with a human voice

More on the apparent decline of blogs from the Government Digital Service (GDS).

This article makes the excellent counterpoint to a recent GDS post apparently attempting to address the debate around the quality of their recent blogging efforts.

> The measures of success cited include levels of ‘engagement’, aligning posts with campaigns, and instances of very senior officials publishing posts. This, to me, fundamentally misunderstands the value of blogging compared with more ‘formal’ communications. Aligning blogs more closely with PR activity doesn’t strengthen blogs— it nullifies their distinct value.

Of course, it is not just GDS who have suffered.

In the early days, blogging and social media was so vital precisely *because* it wasn’t traditional communications. When the communications people caught wind of the popularity of social media, they took control (which, for some reason, comms people are obsessed with). The comms crowd and the marketing mob turned social media into yet another stifled channel, designed to control the message, thereby destroying actual valuable communication.

See also:

* [Small b blogging](https://duncanstephen.net/small-b-blogging/)
* [Strategic thinking with blog posts and stickers](https://duncanstephen.net/strategic-thinking-with-blog-posts-and-stickers/)

Linknote — — 123 words

Business — Culture

The tools matter and the tools don’t matter

It is easy to sneer at a question about what brand of pen to use, or whether you should use a pencil or a typewriter.

But in this piece, Austin Kleon argues that different tools *can* help you “get you to a certain way of working in which you can get your conscious, mechanical mind out of the way” to enable creativity.

> …handwriting is great for coming up with ideas, for note-taking and big picture thinking…
>
> Typing, on the other hand, is great for producing writing for other people… There’s a thing called “transcription fluency,” which boils down to: “when your fingers can’t move as fast as your thoughts, your ideas suffer.”

Linknote — — 117 words

Personal — Web

A few notes on daily blogging

A striking article, partly because I find it slightly eerie that the author chose to start blogging daily on 1 October, the same day I started blogging again.

I haven’t quite managed to blog on a daily basis. Although I do publish something at least once a day, I tend to write multiple posts at a time and schedule them for future publication.

(As an example, I’m writing this on Wednesday 28 February, in the expectation that I will publish it on Tuesday 6 March.)

As a result, I’m not sure I have benefited yet from resuming my regular blogging. Perhaps I will endeavour to carve out some time each day to write something.

Linknote — — 127 words

Technology

Kickstarted: iA Writer for Windows – iA

I am a fan of iA Writer, a writing application designed to help you focus. The only problem is that it is not available for Windows.

I have the Android version installed on my phone. But I don’t know about you — I don’t tend do my writing on my phone. Meanwhile, those fancy Mac users have had a desktop application for a while.

On my Windows machines I have had to make do with using Sublime Text with some Markdown packages installed. Which kind of does the trick, but is not as slick

Finally, a Windows version of iA Writer is coming, and you can back it on Kickstarter. I am looking forward to it and the promised web version.

Article — — 325 words

Culture — Current affairs

Outrage has broken out among pedants everywhere, as it was revealed that Waterstones has dropped the apostrophe from its name. Waterstones is hardly the first business to make this move. For instance, Woolworths was, up until the 1980s, called Woolworth. But people called it Woolworths, so the company adopted it. Note how many people also […]