Hmm, nothing more soothing to end the week on, then a trip to the hairdressers. Think about it , being royally seated while nice looking ladies tend to your every need, get you coffee , wash your hair, and all this in an enviroment where there is always a lot to look at. And as I wait , the trusty macbook never far out of reach , gets popped open for a little article. An article about how I use technology in my life .. and about how I live. To get it all scrutinized in one line ? : Knightwise.com is going back to basics.
How it all started out.
A long time ago in the galaxy of 2001 I started my very own personal website. It was not much, but it gave a clear view of who I was and what my life looked like. Over the years the Knightsite evolved into a daily diary, a site full of fun stuff, sometimes serious articles, a bit of poetry, some cult stuff and also a lot of tech stuff. Not much later the site got switched to english and turned into a kind of a blog. Later on that blog got saturated with manuals about how I use technology in my life and slowly but surely (also with the coming of the Knightcast Podcast) The Knightwise.com website cruised the breach between real- and cyberspace.
A happy ship filled with articles about my personal life, tech reviews, the occasional cult item … Well you know : Life as I know it.
Six months ago, when I met up with Sebastian Prooth and Dave Gray, who where at that moment teaming up to form the Global Geek Podcast, I was introduced to a different style of writing. Both Seb and Dave wrote up great technology articles (certainly worth publication in print). These guys are major bloggers who also knew the tricks of the trade to get your stuff noticed. And from them I learned a lot and was inspired to whip up some great technology articles.
A month or so after that, the Knightwise.com website got noticed on the net. The article about 'Ubuntu for your Grandmother' hit the Digg front-page for 24 consecutive hours and the visitors shot up over 9000 in one day. Needless to say, i felt the eyes of the world upon me at that moment. In conjunction the Knightcast podcast joined the Techpodcast network , and I was shoulder to shoulder with the great in pod-casting like Andy Mccaskey and Mike Smith.
At that moment, I started to feel the pressure to produce top notch content both in pod-casts and in blogposts. Posts had to get hits, Podcasts I put out should be rich in text, poor in cursing and articles had to be promoted and pushed out to be successful. After more then 4 months of this … I have just about had enough.
Rate of posting went down. : Because I fellt (and I must underline that this is a purely subjective feeling) that I needed to produce top quality articles, the daily posts about small peaces of nothing went down and I started writing elaborate well-thought tech articles, that where rich in content , but in my perception lacked soul.
The membership of the Techpodcast network influenced me to start producing podcasts that where more structured (and thats a good thing) but that also started to lack the raw 'feel' of the Knightcast, that gave the show its charm. I mean , talking about live linux distributions while doing the dishes, having a sound-seeing tour to go apple-picking, crazy stuff like that was no longer something I fellt I could do. I mean , I was a member of the TPN , it all had to sound more techie, more professional.. And again .. seemed to lack the soul.
So I started slacking in both production of my podcasts, and in writing articles. This week , after a long period of thinking things over, evaluating the membership of the TPN and looking at visitor numbers, i have decided.
I Dont Give a Frack Anymore !
The last few months the knightwise.com website has fallen prey to the predator called popularity. Having the eyes of the world on your every syllable makes one write differently, having ones show hosted by the same network that brings people the big boys like slashdot review, the mike techshow and so on .. makes one think twice before one burps during recording. I got wound up in this, started to think who would read this, and changed the way I produced content. But today it ends. As from this week I resigned from the techpodcast network and made the Knightwise.Com website and the Knightcast podcast independant and not affiliated with any network whatsoever.
The whole deal is : I want to go back to the way it was. Feeling the Knightwise.com website and the podcast as a vent for my own personal creativity and a digital reflection of my life. This is not a technology blogg with soulless reviews, this is not a technology podcast with elaborate how-to's. This is my digital diary. I tell people how I live, how i use technology and show them the tricks of the trade. This podcast / website is not to educate you , it is not the blog of some pesky journalist. This is my life on the edge of real and cyberspace. And in my life I don't care if I'm popular or not. I'd rather write for 10 people who appreciate it then for 100 soulless diggers who just nose by and forget all about the site on their next click.
So its back to basics. The Knightwise.com website and the Knightcast podcast as a reflection of my digital lifestyle. A Techno soap if you will , but perhaps a cyber-lifestyle magazine with real people. My creativity is something that has seldom been bound by rules regulations and parameters. The only constant was its in-predictability. So the Knightsite is back like you have known it , or perhaps you are new and have never seen it different. Well , be prepared for everyday life on the digital threshold, where I'l give you tips and pointers, an introspection into my own life, where I laugh, where I'm sad, Where I get angry and swear, where I stop to shoot the sunset to show you on flickr. Because I have found out that the elemental truth is : It is in outing my own creativity that I find my passion.. And not in the number of hits that I logged that day.