All true. 25 or 30 years ago I would manually visit specific people’s web sites to see what new stuff they posted. That was not as inconvenient as you might think. The density of information I wanted on the 100 or so sites I had bookmarked was higher than now by far. Blogs used to handle notifications well.

Now, I basically depend on X and even on Facebook to shout out when I have a new book or open source project I want people to check out. This is far from perfect, but requires little of my time. For me to keep producing reading and code content, I feel like I need about 1000 to 2000 ‘true fans’ and I think I have that so I am happy.

For most young people starting to build a web presense, I think it must be much more difficult to get started. Still, I notice some young people creating amazing open source projects and they can create a living pretty quickly. I enjoy reading code as much as the words people write.