Welcome to The Lab!

This is a new effort to capture some of my daily raw thoughts. It’s a callback to the old-school blog approach.

Back in the day, web logs were a way for developers to capture changes to their projects over time. They were a series of quick notes in reverse chronological order. This made it easy to track progress and also troubleshoot.

The marketers got a hold of web logs, gave them a fancy name — blogs — and they became something to court attention.

Once you start courting attention, things change.

You give more thought to how something comes across because you’re trying to appeal to readers instead of capturing something you want to remember.

Now, in the social media era, we’ve lost the concept of sharing as creating a body of work.

Everyone is a marketer now.

Everyone has an audience.

Everyone is a broadcaster.

In this world, metrics are king.

If you can’t measure it, it isn’t real. If it doesn’t hook attention and appeal to the fears and longings of the populace, it’s not worth doing.

A sad state of affairs because the deep thinkers get lost in this shuffle. We need our deep thinkers now more than ever.

The Lab is my stake in the ground back to that space.

I’m building something, and I need the belief to make it happen. I’m cool if you guys are along for the ride. In fact, it would be enormously helpful to me.

The Lab is where I intend to record my humanity along the way.

If you want to follow me these are probably two of the best ways:

1. Sign up to get each of these by email as I post them. I might do several a day so you might get more than you bargained for. But you do you.
2. Use an RSS reader like NetNewsWire, Feedly, or Inoreader. It will show all my Lab posts and you can decide which ones you want to read. I recommend this as a way to read all your news. Much better than social media.

My lab posts won’t all be this long, or maybe they will be, but I wanted you to have some context.

I will turn on commenting and social shares if you find something you want to put into your own spaces.

— LRM