Kevin Rothermel

No Spoilers.

Brand Strategist
Professor, VCU Brandcenter

No Spoilers.

About / Contact / Archive

  • RSS
  • Tumblr
  • Twitter

Powered by Genesis

January 17, 2020

I miss the experiments of the Olde Internette.

Time was, people would try little experiments online. Like supergluing something to a wall and live-streaming it, or writing on a website that they owned.

Heady times. Back before social media killed the open web.

I’m always happy to see experimental webthings popping up. It’s proof that there’s still life out there.

Two such internety experiments popped up today:

  1. This website is an interactive map that writes a Haiku based on where you are in NYC.
  2. On this website music samples are plotted along the 13 dimensions of self-reported emotional experience evoked by music across cultures. (HT Rob Campbell)

http://kevinrothermel.com/blog/4425/

Filed Under: Journal Tagged With: internet

Writing For People, Not Machines

April 20, 2018

As I’ve been spending more time reading blogs and publication home pages again. The content that is served up in social media isn’t holding up so well. It’s a little … loud and shallow. Stimulating in an entirely wrong way.

Like Carrot Top.

I hate Carrot Top.

The Real Interesting is still found out in the open web, where ideas and writing styles haven’t been sanded down for the benefit of algorithms.

Venture there and you’ll find headlines that weren’t written for SEO. Writing that has paragraphs. And thinking. And sometimes nonsense. Sometimes it’s long and sometimes it’s short. Sometimes it’s just an image.

But there’s and honesty and integrity to good web writing that just doesn’t work on networked platforms.

Maybe because success in the wild open web seems to come from a consistent body of work.

It’s writing meant to communicate with people, not impress machines.

Filed Under: Journal Tagged With: internet, Writing

but does it float?

April 17, 2018

but does it float, one of the blogs I found through Kottke’s post full of people’s favorite blogs, is unlike any blog I’ve visited before. It’s a welcome break from the literal and analytical and fame-seeking and monetizing that makes up the vast majority of the 2018 Internet. No hot-takes or link-posts or pushy algorithms or sponsored suggested content featuring things that so-and-so just did to some other thing that you won’t believe.

The format: conceptual title followed by a few screens worth of images that appear as you scroll. The effect is hypnotic. Falling through a well of imagination and half-ideas. Your brain fills in the emotion. The interpretation.

I can’t recreate it, but here’s a screenshot of a recent post that does it no justice:

Screen Shot 2018 04 17 at 11 22 29 AM

Click through for the full effect: Truth suffers from too much analysis

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: blogging, creativity, internet

Windows of San Francisco

February 10, 2018

Screen Shot 2018 02 10 at 2 34 52 PM

Windows of San Francisco is a project that captures the sites and sounds of looking out of 100 different windows in San Francisco.

Screen Shot 2018 02 10 at 2 35 04 PM

It reminds me of the old internet, full of odd little projects and experiments. Things that you’d find on Russell’s blog way back before the Internet turned into algorithms and outrage.

Via swiss-miss.

Filed Under: Journal Tagged With: internet, projects

Indie Microblogging: owning your short-form writing

January 7, 2017

Manton Reece is launching an independent platform for microblogging:

Do you remember how the web used to work? How the web was supposed to work?

In the earlier days of the web, we always published to our own web site. If you weren’t happy with your web host, or they went out of business, you could move your files and your domain name, and nothing would break.

Today, most writing instead goes into a small number of centralized social networking sites, where you can’t move your content, advertisements and fake news are everywhere, and if one of these sites fails, your content disappears from the internet. Too many sites have gone away and taken our posts and photos with them.

Check out the Kickstarter page. It might not work. But neither will Twitter.

Filed Under: Journal Tagged With: internet, media, social media, Technology