Yours truly was recently invited as guest to the JS Party podcast to talk about…not JS! If you’ve been wondering about where the the part of the web is going that is “content”, why it’s so critical to invest in it & the web creator landscape, and what Google is doing about it, I think this would be a worthwhile listen:

Alternatively, listen & comment on JS Party.

I think it ended up being a very good conversation and it’s clear the JS Party crew has a lot of empathy for the non-technical creator struggling on the web (in most developer contexts, I expect more pushback!). We’ve touched lots of important topics, here’s a very rough agenda:

  1. Why we’ve started calling bloggers “web creators”
  2. What Google Web Creators is, and how DevRel was the inspiration for it
  3. Why there’s been little innovation around blogging in the last 20 years
  4. How we’re planning on helping both existing bloggers and new creators & influencers succeed on the web
  5. Why it’s a problem that only big YouTubers can afford to own a custom website
  6. Why Stories on the web are different from stories elsewhere, and a big deal for creators
  7. The sliding scale of open vs. closed platforms & ecosystems
  8. How Google’s incentives are perfectly aligned with creator incentives
  9. How the intention of AMP was fundamentally misunderstood
  10. Why “link in bio” is a significant problem to creators & users
  11. What Google Discover is, why it matters to story discovery, and also, why it doesn’t
  12. How to lead to Web Stories from your social media
  13. Why a picture of your dog might not be a great fit for a Web Story
  14. How onboarding a new creator onto the web is almost comically bad today
  15. Why I believe in anti-gatekeeping, and why it’s a theme for my career
  16. Why newsletters are just a cry for help to get RSS back in a great, user-friendly way
  17. what creators struggle the most with today (spoiler alert: finding time to actually create)
  18. Why kids don’t ‘get’ browsers anymore

This was a densely packed hour around one theme (making sure the web becomes the best platform for creators again), so if that’s your kind of thing, there you go!

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