Investor report, quality of life updates, an interview with Maya Man, and more
Good day to you, and a belated happy year of the snake. You know what they say, it’s always new year somewhere.
This is the frustrating part of the year when the change from winter to spring is both slow and sporadic. Trust me, spring is coming. If it’s already pleasant where you are, weather-wise, then just ignore this.
Right now we’re thinking about attention. Realistically, we’re never not thinking about attention. We’re also listening to Try as I May by Cameron Winter. What are you thinking about? What are you listening to?
Product
We’ve got a couple of larger projects on our plates right now (ahem, mobile), but in the meantime we’ve managed to release some smaller, quality of life updates that will make everyday use of Are.na a little nicer:
Configurable shortcut keys to trigger browser extension
Auto-saving edits in browser extension
Improved loading for block thumbnails and lightbox
One larger than small thing that is going to be imminently released for Chrome and Firefox (maybe even by the time you read this): screenshots on the browser extension. You know those tricky times when you want to show a webpage how it is in a certain state? Just click the little camera and your link will be saved with your screenshot.
Investor report
It’s that time of the half-year again. Time for our bi-annual investor report, which will come out next week. This covers our metrics in detail from the second half of 2024, including our revenue, new accounts, new connections, etc etc. It also details what we worked on, what worked well, what didn’t work well, and what we are planning for and working on this year.
If you’re interested in how Are.na operates as a business, consider upgrading to the Supporter tier ($120/yr) which gives you access to this report (and all past reports), early access to new features, a free Are.na Annual and more.
Are.na Editorial
New on editorial this month, we have:
Maya Man, a brilliant artist in her own right, has opened up a new curatorial space in New York called HEART. We got to experience it first hand when we held a reading for the Are.na Annual there in December. These kinds of spaces are a rarity these days and Maya’s an ideal person to be running one, as a supporter of and connector within a network of artists working with software, the internet, and pop culture.
Documenting the Divine by Chia Amisola
Chia Amisola, also an important node in the network mentioned above, wrote a beautiful essay on Marian apparitions, domesticity, divinity, and technology’s relationship to faith. It’s a kind of companion piece to their artwork Himala, a desktop performance that reinterprets the mysteries of the rosary.
In the Earth Beneath by Amelia K.
We also republished an essay from the Are.na Annual by Amelia K, about heritage, hauntings and leaving her hometown. Amelia’s writing is stunning, a must-read.
Surfactant Program by Rosemary Wexler
And finally, a lovely piece by Rosemary Wexler on weaving and the texture of the web as “its own irreducible expression.” This is a transcipt from one of our audio experiments with Montez Press Radio. Rosemary’s Are.na activity is always very inspiring, and this piece is such a nice continuation of it, in published form.
Press
Thank you to Kristoffer Tjalve for mentioning us in his newsletter, Naive Weekly. A reader asked him where he finds the links he publishes in his newsletter, and he not only named Are.na but also gave an extremely good description of it. We’re taking notes.
Essentially, it is a social bookmarking tool. It took me years to get used to, but now Are.na is my most beloved website. What makes Are.na perfect for discovery is that whatever you bookmark must be added to a specific channel. It’s not possible to post into the ether like on social media. On Are.na, you must define where your bookmark, called block, belongs. This subtle decision has rippling effects. Suddenly, you don’t follow people as you do on social media, but you follow their curiosities. This makes a much richer and sprawling environment to explore.
Community News
If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for the Blacks of Are.na newsletter. B.O.A is a group organized by Darrel Kennedy and Alice Otieno that has a Cinema Club and now a nice monthly series where they highlight one of their members. First up for February was STR33T, (Justin Scott).
As fans of A Pattern Language we were very excited to see Jenn Scheer’s beautiful website A Pattern Language Index which shows all the patterns from A Pattern Language and links them together, into a kind of pattern.
Finally, Lok also added this nice are.na blocks canvas (abc) to Are.na, a visual tool for exploring Are.na blocks in a canvas interface, allowing you to interact with blocks more spatially.
If you have any community news for us, please do add to this channel. This is where we select things to run in this very newsletter.
Are.na Annual
In addition to the Are.na store, there are now Are.na Annuals in Inga Bookshop in Chicago, Topos in Queens, and Well Read in Lisbon. Feel free to reach out if you’d like to stock, or if you have a favorite bookstore you’d like to see the book in: info@are.na.
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.
The Are.na Team