A Blog That Grows Like a Vine, Not an Archive
Jay Hoffman and I have been trading notes about the web for a long time — since he started writing his series on web history, in fact. Those conversations tend to wander through the web's more interesting corners, and they're always easy to pick back up. But sometimes schedules don't line up, and a chat has to wait.
Around the same time, we'd been discussing different philosophies of blogging, particularly the notion of a "digital garden." We weren't planning to plant one ourselves, but the concept nudged us toward moving our long-running dialogue onto a blog — still one of the best formats the web has produced.
What we didn't want was a linear archive, the usual chronological stack of posts. The idea was to start with a seed and let it grow into a vine that twists and turns on its own. That's where the "Dialogues" format came from — Jay's idea, really. He asks me a question, I answer it in a post with a follow-up question of my own, he answers that with another question, and so on.
The opening question is already live, and it's a fitting one for a conversation about the web: What was the moment the web clicked for you? Answering it meant looking back at myself as a web user some 30 years ago — a worthwhile exercise in reflection, and a good way to get the ball rolling.
