Hi, nice to be with you again.

We can’t believe it’s September, but it truly is, there’s no denying it. It’s possible that time is a flat circle. It’s possible that time is any number of things. But our subjective experience is all that matters and that experience tells us that time is accelerating.

We’re thinking about the observer effect and listening to a song called Namopi. What have you been thinking about? What are you listening to?

Product News

Speaking of accelerating, so much has happened since we last spoke that it’s difficult to decide what to tell you about first.

Before we go into anything else, you might have heard that we recently turned 15 years old. To celebrate, we revamped our logged-out homepage (we also did this when we turned 10).

We’ve also made a ton of updates to Are.na itself that you might be interested in. For instance, the browser extension has had some major updates: it can now be resized and moved around. You can also take cropped screenshots of a webpage right from the extension itself, and (as always) the source of the screenshot will be associated with the image.

Lastly for the web, and in preparation for some bigger updates, we added the ability to drag blocks across browser windows to connect them.

iOS-wise, some of you will be happy to know that we’ve made some progress in making the app a little more iPad friendly.

Along with numerous other iOS updates, maybe the most interesting is that the bottom tab bar is now customizable, meaning you can add shortcuts to your favorite channels, groups, and profiles as well as remove any links that aren’t relevant to how you use Are.na on the phone. We love this feature, and we’d love to see how other people are using it.

Channel Walkthroughs on NYTV

We also have a few exciting events coming up, the first of which is at 8pm EST tonight (Thursday, September 3). Tune in to New York Television to see the first of a new format for Channel Walkthroughs, our long-standing series where people share their Are.na channels and walk us through what they’ve saved and why.

This new iteration of Channel Walkthroughs is hosted by Scott Schwartz, who for this episode will talk to Shelby Shaw about the channel Dating Online and Bri Griffin about the channel ☆ websites that are chefs kiss with the ruffle flash extension ☆.

Watch live at 8pm EST on nytv.live and join the chat to ask Shelby and Bri questions about their channels (or just send messages of encouragement). We can’t wait, this will be very fun.

Areal Font Download Party with Dinamo

A little more than a year ago, we unveiled our collaboration with Dinamo: a custom typeface called Areal, a “revival” of Arial, entirely redrawn and rebuilt from the ground up. Now, we’re excited to tell you that Areal is going to be released for free, for everyone, all thanks to Dinamo.

On Saturday, September 12, join us and Dinamo to celebrate its public release, and download the font for yourself.

Where:

Index Greenpoint
698 Manhattan Ave, Fl 2 & 3
Brooklyn, NY 11222

When:

Saturday, September 12
6:30pm-10pm

There will also be some limited-edition Areal merch available!

RSVP here.

Are.na at the NY Art Book Fair

We’re excited to partner with the NY Art Book Fair this year, backing the Shannon Michael Cane Award, which gives a complimentary table and an unrestricted stipend to four first time exhibitors. This year’s winners are 19Editions (France), Bebe Books (Belgium), Kayfa ta (Jordan, Egypt), and merath (Libya).

We’ll also have a booth with past Annuals and some surprise merch—come visit us at the table S4 from Friday, Sept 25 to Sunday, Sept 27.

How do you describe Are.na at a party?

In conjunction with our 15th birthday on August 9, we published a piece on Are.na Editorial by Charles Broskoski titled “How do you describe Are.na at a party?”

This is also the name of a channel we started 11 years ago that has since collected over 500 responses to the titular question. The responses are really good, and we often point people to it when asked to define what Are.na is.

In the piece, Charles talks about how although we’ve sometimes felt the need for a succinct definition for Are.na, in the end we’ve come to prefer being collectively defined, just as Are.na as a platform is continually and collectively shaped by our members. Which is why, when we sat down to make the new version of the homepage, it felt like the best decision to lean into this polyvocal definition of Are.na.

More on Are.na Editorial

Also published to our online publication this month is an interview with author and art critic Emily LaBarge on her new book Dog Days. Sara Magenheimer talks to Emily about narrative cracks, trauma as a rupturing experience, and references as fellow travelers.

As Emily puts it,

There’s not much else to do on this planet than pay attention. There’s no other meaning to be found here, so everyone chooses how they make meaning.

Read the interview here.

Community News

For the past three weekends, The Creative Independent has become a public park via revolving footage from Elliott Cost’s “One Minute Park” project. This weekend is the last weekend you can catch it on TCI, so be sure to visit thecreativeindependent.com on Sept 5-6. To contribute your own One Minute Park video, go to this Are.na channel.

Our summer product intern, Miffy Wang, released Are.na Revisit, which uses the Are.na API to help you revisit old channels. This comes out of a project she did talking to all different types of researchers and collectors about their processes and pain points for saving and synthesizing large amounts of research. The most common pain point? Being encouraged to revisit old data.

Celine Nguyen wrote a piece on taste for Asterisk magazine title “Why We Like Things,” featuring an excerpt from Charles Broskoski’s 2023 talk-turned-essay “Here for the Wrong Reasons.” Celine later has a nice paraphrase of Charles’ notion of “nodal points,” writing,

We are not self-made in our tastes; instead, we move through an infinitely expanding landscape of information and objects, guided by the people we meet, admire, and love.

j youngblood put together a library for loading Are.na API data through Astro.

And on August 23, Firuza Huseynova held the third Channel Surfing event, this time featuring Chaski from Cybernetics Library and Depths of Wikipedia’s Annie Rauwerda. This one focused on “all things WIKI: rabbit holes, hyperlinks, online communities, free information, folksonomic classification, and the usefulness of useless knowledge.”

If you have any news you’d like us to share, feel free to put it in our Community News channel.

Roadmap

As always, you can check out our roadmap page which goes into the features we're building, our long-term goals, and our current numbers.

There are so many places you can spend your attention, and we’re touched that you spent it reading this letter.

in theory,
The Are.na Team