What's this all about?
I spent the past 20 years writing behind the scenes for others. Now it’s time to get back to writing for myself. Expect this blog to be a lot about AI and digital trends, with the odd random snippet!
Long ago, when the internet was young, I had a Flickr blog called Interesting Snippets. It married quotes about the impact of digital with a creative-commons images that — at least in my mind — helped to bring them to life. I’d include a para or two explaining why it had piqued my interest, and share my perspectives. In a way it functioned as a kind of diary, and looking back it’s fun to see both how right I sometimes got it, as well as how wrong and naive I could be about digital’s impact.
Then in 2007 I joined Google. Back then, personal blogging was strongly discouraged, and I was so manically busy I no longer had time anyway. I’ve often regretted stopping, but somehow never got myself back onto the blogging wagon.
Fast forward nearly 16 years — in July this year I left Google. Now I’d like to get back to sharing my own thoughts, in my own voice. It’s not that I’ve been totally silent up until now — I just became a voice behind the scenes writing speeches for senior executives, and later Google-branded AI policy whitepapers without authorship. Occasionally I got to put my name to a post on a Google Blog (example, example), although as things became more corporate and my role evolved, opportunities to do that faded (although not entirely).
Don’t get me wrong — I loved writing for Google, especially the whitepapers, since doing so under a Google moniker was a way to reach a far broader audience than I alone would have commanded. And I’m proud to say I never wrote anything I disagreed with — even if there were times that I had to fight very hard, and remove or tone things down that didn’t meet the approval of PR/policy/legal reviewers. But it’s different writing for someone else than for yourself.
At one point I thought about resurrecting my old Flickr blog, but the magic of the serendipitous matching of a found image with a quote no longer seems there in a world of generative AI where you can create anything you can imagine. Also, I have acquired a taste for long-form writing. So at least for now, I am going to treat this blog primarily as a place for sharing essays. They may not be very frequent, but in the act of writing them I will be exploring and structuring my own thoughts.
First essay, coming soon :)