Maciej Cegłowski
Fan is a Tool-Using Animal
2013
About this talk
What happens when you build a nice website, and a real community shows up that doesn’t meet your expectations?
Since the earliest days of Usenet, fandom has wandered the Internet, finding remarkable ways to assemble websites, plug-ins, and online forums into tools for sharing and organizing erotic fiction. Often ostracized and ridiculed for their hobby, this community of rather gentle people has learned to work with the materials at hand, building for themselves what they could not get from others, in the process creating a culture of collaboration and mutual respect other online projects can only envy.
Fans are inveterate classifiers, and the story of how they have bent websites to their will (in a process reminiscent of their favorite works) may change the way you think about online communities, or at the very least, about librarians.
Photo by happy.apple
About Maciej Cegłowski
Maciej Cegłowski is my favourite writer on the web.
But don‘t take my word for it. Have a read through Idle Words and see for yourself. Travel, food, jellyfish, and space shuttles are just some of the subjects he has tackled. Perhaps you‘ve heard about Argentina on Two Steaks a Day or maybe you‘re familiar with The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel.
When he‘s not lovingly crafting words, Maciej lovingly crafts Pinboard—the bookmarking service with the radical business model of actually charging customers money (see also: the revolutionary Pinboard Investment Co-Prosperity Cloud that offers startup funding of $37 to successful applicants).
His pragmatic approach to building a sustainable and scalable business is a breath of fresh air in the fetid miasma of most startups, and his observations and updates on the Pinboard blog are almost as good as Idle Words.
