I’ve been a trade journalist for decades but I only have a vague idea what “go-to-market” strategy is. Whenever I hear the phrase, I visualize an anthropomorphic goose in a gingham dress with a wicker basket over her arm, going off to market to buy groceries.
For me, Micro.blog is a good, but not great, hosting platform for my blog at mitchwagner.com. I see Manton Reece, the proprietor of Micro.blog, focused on making the platform into a suite of products — RSS reader, note taker, book tracker, podcast platform, etc. — and I am not the customer for those products.
Micro.blog is a very small, gated community. I like the broader community of Mastodon and Bluesky.
And Micro.blog has a steady stream of trivial bugs and quirks that can sometimes make it difficult to post.
To use a syntactical trick that was popular recently in the internet: I’m not planning to migrate off Micro.blog, but I’m not not planning on it.
Unfortunately, there does not seem to be an alternative to Micro.blog for easy personal blogging.
I accidentally kicked the dog — we were in the kitchen and I did not see she was underfoot — so now I need to find a tall building and throw myself off it.
đź”—Links
JD Vance Gave A Speech To Almost No One, And The Photos Are Wild
Nursing and other healthcare jobs are becoming gig work — like driving or delivering food for Uber — making the jobs more miserable and low-paying, writes Cory Doctorow.
The platforms collude with lawmakers and regulators who are in the pockets of investors.
It’s part of a larger economic trend: “From fintech to price-fixing to gig-work, the entire industry runs on the very stupid proposition that ‘it’s not a crime if we do it with an app.'”
Cory: “Sometime in this century, our political class and our financial class arrived at a consensus that Douglas Rushkoff describes as ‘go meta,’ in his 2022 book _Survival of the Richest_:
“The ‘go meta’ ethos insists that the most important, smartest and most valuable move is always _away_ from productive labor. Don’t drive a cab: go meta and own a medallion that you rent to a cab driver. Don’t own a medallion, go meta and start a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don’t start a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and _invest_ in a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don’t invest in a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and buy _options_ in a gig-work ride-hailing company – and so on and so on, into ever more abstracted forms of gambling and rent-collection.”
I’ve been saying this for years: It often seems that the only way to succeed is not to do work that produces value, like a nurse. It’s not even to own property, like a 19th Century robber-baron that owned factories and railroads that produced value. The only way to succeed is to move money around. That’s a bad way to run a society, and it results in riots and blood in the streets when the workers get desperate enough.
Liz Lopatto, who is a national treasure, explains “Donald Trump’s beef with Pope Leo XIV and how it threatens to unravel the American political right and possibly kick off the Butlerian jihad.”
🦍MItchellaneous
New York Dolls (1973) www.tumblr.com/atomic-ch…
Life goal.
Publicity photograph of Mae West for the 1928 play Diamond Lil. West lounges in a large bed shaped like a swan. She holds papers in one hand and a cigarette in the other. www.tumblr.com/blondebra…
A woman demonstrates how to use the first commercial microwave oven, the Radarange, by Raytheon www.facebook.com/AncientTh…
Protesting the high school dress code that banned slacks for girls in Brooklyn, circa 1940. www.tumblr.com/mostlysig…