People and Blogs: Ben Werdmuller

Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hi! I’m Ben Werdmuller. I was born in the Netherlands, grew up and spent my twenties in the UK, and spent twelve years in the San Francisco Bay Area. Now I live in Greater Philadelphia in a creaky old house with my partner, our two year old son, and my father. At night the pipes clang and we sometimes wonder if they’re haunted.

My high school yearbook declared that I would be a journalist. That didn’t come to pass. Between then and now, I got distracted by the emerging web: what a wonderful medium to tell stories and find community. I studied computer science in Edinburgh because it was the only British university that didn’t think I was unfocused for being interested in both computers and writing.

Journalist or not, as it turns out, I can’t stop writing. In 1998, while I was at university, I started keeping a “web diary.” Then I built a humor webzine that accidentally grew to over a million page views a day. Ultimately, that led to me learning a lot about nascent social media and building one of the first open source social networking platforms. I’m socially, rather than financially, driven; my proudest moment was learning that it was used to organize the M-15 anti-austerity protests in Spain.

I co-founded two startups, mostly as a way to do work under my own steam. (I’m a terrible employee.) But I did spend some time working for other tech companies, and even invested in startups as part of a media accelerator funded by PRX, KQED, the Associated Press, and the New York Times, among others. These days, I lead technology at ProPublica, a non-profit investigative newsroom that reports on abuses of trust in the public interest. But, of course, I still have my own projects: most notably a full-length novel that I’m nearly done with.

What's the story behind your blog?

As I mentioned, I started a blog in 1998, although we didn’t know to call them that then. I sort of careened from platform to platform: hand-rolled HTML, Greymatter, Movable Type, LiveJournal, WordPress, my own Elgg and Known platforms. Almost all of them were named after some variation of my name or handle. At one point, when I was decades younger, it was called Squirming, because that was how I felt (and feel) in the world: always just a little bit uncomfortable in my own skin.

I originally just wanted to share a little bit of myself and hopefully, if I was lucky, finding some like-minded people to connect with. That changed a little when George W. Bush was elected in 2000: I couldn’t believe that America voted for the governor with the record for the most executions. It was the first time I realized that there really were people out there who had radically different beliefs, for whom the death penalty and religious conservatism were not just tolerable but desirable. When he started drumming up support for the War in Iraq, I became more vocal. My dad was a Vietnam War protester, and both parents were activists for equal rights, so I grew up with left-wing politics around the kitchen table; that’s what my family talked about every night while we were eating. It was natural to bring those topics to my blog.

When I founded Elgg, the social networking platform, I narrated my journey there, so it became a little more about technology and entrepreneurship. My politics actually informed my technology work: outrage over lock-in, rent-seeking, and sky-high license fees for private educational software paid with taxpayer funds led me to build Elgg. All of that was written out in the open in my posts.

A decade later, I built the first version of Known while my mother recovered from a double lung transplant. I actually started building it because she wanted a community of support but couldn’t bring herself to share her private medical journey on Facebook. Writing about building it, and its role on the indieweb, became an outlet that helped me deal with (or, probably more accurately, was a distraction from) the absolute heartbreak of caring for a loved one with a terminal illness.

So these days, my blog has a mix of those things: a progressive, humanist approach to technology and society, with a little bit of outrage about where things seem to be headed. The site is currently called Werd I/O, which I think I thought made it sound more like a professional technology site that people might want to subscribe to, but I’m planning to change it back. I’m Ben Werdmuller. My site is my online identity; I write about things that I find interesting. That’s all I want it to be. It’s just me.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

I’m what writers call a pantster: I write by the seat of my pants. Usually, the first draft is what I end up publishing. My proof-readers are the first people who read the post.

If my post is a long-form reflection, it’ll sometimes take me an hour to write. I do try and check for spelling and grammar, although eagle-eyed readers will usually notice some cheeky edits in the minutes after I’ve hit publish. These are usually spurred by an idea that I want to explore; my post about it is just me thinking out loud, in a way. Writing helps me organize my thoughts, and it just so happens to be in public. I use iA Writer, which is a lovely, minimalist markdown editor, and then copy and paste into Known.

If it’s a link post, I’m usually publishing because I’ve just read something interesting and I want to share it. I don’t save bookmarks outside of my blog, or keep private notes, so there’s also, again, an element of reflecting on what I’ve just read and saving my thoughts for my own needs. I’ve got a browser bookmarklet that allows me to save my thoughts about it; then, when I hit Save, a pipeline of automations sends it to my blog and shares it on social media.

My worst posts are driven by an angry knee-jerk response to something I hated. I can get really angry, usually about right-wing politics, and the need to post cathartically sometimes occludes real reflection. Sometimes people respond to my catharsis and identify with it, so it’s not like these posts are valueless, but I still don’t think it’s as useful or productive as publishing something more deeply reflective.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I’ve been blogging for long enough that I can do it anywhere. I’m writing these answers with my laptop balanced on my knee on a SEPTA train in Northern Philadelphia at rush hour, with people all around me traveling back to their homes. It’s been a long time since I’ve had blank page syndrome; wherever I am, I can pull up iA Writer and type.

But there’s a mental creative environment that’s more important. The quality of my writing is directly impacted by the quality of my reading. If I’ve only been reading social media that day, my writing is anxious, poorly-framed, and staccato. If I’ve been reading long-form pieces, I find that it’s calmer and more reflective. It’s at its best when I’ve been reading a really good book.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I still use Known, which I built, as my CMS. It’s running on PHP 8.2 with a MongoDB back-end, and is hosted on a VPS on DigitalOcean. The domain is registered at Gandi.

Newsletter subscriptions run on Kit. I’ve previously used Buttondown, which is brilliant but not quite what I needed, and Substack, which I think every blogger should avoid. Kit picks up every new full-length blog post from the RSS feed and sends it in real time; it also gathers up my link blog posts and sends them as a digest on Monday mornings. The blog is always the source of truth for all my content; I think of the newsletter as an alternative to RSS for people who don’t use a reader. (Hey, email’s an open protocol too. Use what works for you.)

At some point, I’ll need to change my domain name. Werd.io is part of the .io top-level domain, which is assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory. Quite rightly, and far too late, the British are ceding that territory back to Mauritius. At that point, there will be no British Indian Ocean Territory, and by ICANN’s rules .io will stop being supported.

To be honest: I didn’t understand that the TLD was a product of colonization when I originally bought it, and I should never have used it. It’s not a good look to still be using it today. I still own benwerd.com, and maybe I’ll revert to that. I’m genuinely not sure what I’ll do yet.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

Right now my blog nominally has a tech / media / society angle, because that’s the intersection of where I work, what I’m interested in professionally, and where my anxieties about the world lie. But I’ll veer out of that to, for example, call for a Red Dwarf reboot or be excited about a book I read. I wish I hadn’t attempted a professional angle; I want to have impunity to just be excited about things or talk about my life.

Or, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, I want to post fiction and art. I’ve considered starting a completely new website for that, but wouldn’t it be nice if that could just sit on my main blog?

There’s a newsletter version of my blog, too, which has quite a few subscribers who now expect that professional angle. On one level, it feels good to see all these people who interact with the pieces I’ve written; on another, it’s a trap. I had to start a new stream of content called asides, which are posts that won’t make it to the newsletter, so that I could feel free to post and just be myself, without worrying that my random notes would be emailed to hundreds of people.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

This is an expensive hobby.

My DigitalOcean droplet is $48 a month. But it’s worth pointing out: that’s where all my projects sit; it’s not limited to my website. I find it useful to have a server where I can just muck about. For example, ShareOpenly and Get Blogging are hosted on it, too.

Then Kit, which powers the newsletter, is another $49 a month.

I’m not in it to make money directly. I have experimented with both premium content and ads over the years, mostly to try and better understand the underlying dynamics, but never made any real money out of them. I can thank blogging for much of my career, so I figure it pays for itself in the end. Even if it didn’t, it would be worth it for the satisfaction I get from writing, and for all the people I’ve met along the way.

But I don’t begrudge people from trying to make money directly from their blogs. In an ideal world, everyone should be able to make money from their creative work. I’ve supported blogs via Ko-fi and Patreon, and will continue to. By far my favorite way to support bloggers, though, is by buying their other art, long-form writing, or software that I’ve learned about from their blogs.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

All blogs are worth checking out, but here are some favorites that come to mind:

MetaFilter, which is really a group blog, has been an essential part of my day for almost 25 years.

My guilty, secret pleasure is Everlasting Blort, which collects weird stuff from across social media and the web that I don’t find anywhere else.

Tracy Durnell and Simon Willison both have incredibly thoughtful blogs that share their thinking-in-progress out loud and curate some of the best posts from across the web. I aspire to blog like them.

Winnie Lim writes beautifully and personally about her life. Her blog is art: literary memoir as website. I can’t think of anyone who does it better.

I’m similarly impressed by Maya.land, which feels very personal, both in form and content. A real showcase for what the indie web can be. I think she’s who you should interview next.

I’ve taken my NewsBlur subscriptions and turned them into a public feed, so you can see exactly what I’m reading. It’s worth saying, though, that I don’t agree with or endorse everything those sources publish; for example, I read Marginal Revolution to get an insight into conservative economics, but that’s a universe away from my worldview.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

This is a year when blogging is going to be more important than ever. We need independent voices to tell their stories and share their lived experiences. Not only is that what makes the web such a vibrant medium, but it’s democratically important, too. The more we know about how other people live, the more we can relate to them and understand them as people.

So: to the extent that you can do so safely, please write.