Big Table #9 - Octothorpes
Well hello there friends. It's been a time.
You may recall some cryptic "I'm working on a Thing" lines from previous emails. You may have heard this from me in person, or you may have heard all about this already for far too long (you are very patient Martha). Or, if you are my friend Nik, you did an enormous amount of work because you built this thing with me. Hi, Nik!
The Thing is (っ◔◡◔)っ ♥ Octothorpes ♥. "Octothorpe" is another word for hashtag. Octothorpes are hashtags that you can use on regular websites. That's what we made.
So, like, platforms like Twitter and Instagram have hashtags, and when you click on them you can see an open-ended list of posts by anyone using that term. But the posts are only on that platform.
But with Octothorpes, you can put hashtags on your own website, join one or many Octothorpe servers (we're calling them Rings), and anyone else on those rings can share those hashtags. Also backlinks!
How?
But the more fun answer is that I came up with the idea on a long, long, looong hike in Canyonlands with Vee in 2021, talked about it a lot with Nik for a couple years, built a little bit of the idea, got hella distracted by life and other projects, built the Memex with Octothorpes in mind, got hella distracted by many other life and art projects, had a great chicken sandwich with Nik once while he convinced me this "RDF" stuff was cool, got impressed by what Nik was building and excited to work with him, then Nik moved away to Sweden, then I got hella distracted by many other life and art projects, but I caught myself working on the project in my mind or nonexistent spare time, and then said out loud to Martha "Octothorpes is a cool idea but I just have too many other meaningful creative projects and I need to just let it go", which immediately set in motion some monstrous gear in the machinery of the universe to upend Nik's life in such a way that he sat down and banged out a prototype and, then kind of it became our extra unpaid job ever since then but it's the first software job I love.
We found a grant that applied to us that was due June 1 and hustled to get something together for that (hasn't announced yet 🤞), and then took a breather, Nik moved back to Portland, and then we both got into XOXO and were like, shit, if this is going to get out in the world, it should start there. So, then, much more hustling. But I feel like we made a great showing, in part thanks to the excellent print job Secret Room did on our handout which only looked so cool because Martha is legit our design consultant now. We had lots of excellent conversations, met some great people, and have more and more exciting work to do now.
What I like about this story is how completely chaotic and happenstance the road has been so far, and how collaborative and sorta punk rock it's been. And working with Nik has been so easy and so awesome and I feel very lucky that we have found this collaborative groove. Thanks for being rad, Nik!!
Why?
So, when I started writing about why we're building this, I ended up writing three whole essays. And, if you click on that link, you'll see an octothorpe at the end of the page that collects them and something Nik wrote and whatever comes next.
Then, not content with those thousands of words, I wrote a recap of XOXO because for once the things I had been pacing around trying to describe in essays that no one reads were all in a very active zeitgeist, and turns out everyone else at XOXO was trying to articulate some of the same things. And people even read and shared this one!
I started it out with an attempt to summarize the thorny questions in widespread discussion:
what’s wrong with the internet now
can we make it not poisonous again
could we even make it fun again
what about all those sites we used to make for ouselves
how can we find the people and communities doing that now
As is the nature of zeitgeists, I keep discovering people working on these kinds of questions in their own ways in new places, and cool new projects looking for new ways to make things and connect on the internet. I included some of that in the various essays above, but just for Big Table here's a little link roundup of some pertinent or delightful stuff that didn't make it in yet
The Internet Fridge powered by play html
Which you can find on the Tiny Awards
So, this is a shorter email because I already wrote so much about Octothorpes at those links above. And it's a later email because I juuuust missed finishing it before Martha and I finally went on a honeymoon and spent 10 amazing days in Japan! I'll make a real post about that by next time, but for now you can see some photos at this little tumblr I set up. I even managed to get it to send one octothorpe! (Tumblr's idea of "web page" turns out to be a little hinkey.)
Anyway, I hope you like Octothorpes and if you have thoughts or questions I'd love to hear them. We're gonna roll it out publicly soon, so with any luck there will just be more and cooler news about Octothorpes from here on out.
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ps Followup on last issue -- Martha made a great tri-fold pamphlet about Buckmanite for her table at the Form.a art fair, and we put samples in little boxes and sold them for donations to local nonprofits that work with the unhoused population and we raised more than $100! Trash transformed!