HELLO, I'M SETH WERKHEISER

LET PEOPLE FIND YOUR WEBSITE

If we can agree that we’re posting into the void on social media, why not just post on our own sites “into the void?”

I recently suggested a client add a blog to their website, and they sent me this:

“Literally within one week (of adding the blog) this led to an invitation to give a talk (you know the old-fashioned way, you introduce yourself to someone cool, they look you up, find your website and boom).”

If someone looks you up, and you’re on a social media platform and they don’t have an account, it’s very hard (or sometimes impossible) for them to see your work.

But every smart phone ships with a web browser. No one needs to have an account to view your website on the wide open internet.

When adding to your own website, you’re not posting into the void, you’re building an online archive.

HUNTERTHEN, ‘A CONVERGENCE OF VACANT ORBITS’

Like Rick Rubin once said, “make stuff, and show it to your friends.”

This is operational, minimal, quietly persistent. Music for background processing.

This is what I want to hear, so I figured out how to make it. This is my seventh release, and I’m still learning how to create and shape these releases.

All sounds made on a Novation Bass Station II, recorded and mixed in Abelton Live, and the final full mix (available as a paid download only) is made with my minimal DJ browser app.

For licensing inquiries (films, videos, podcasts, installations) please get in touch.

MY MINIMAL DJ BROWSER APP WITH MIDI CONTROL

Modern DJ software is bloated, and way too much for what I need, so I built this minimal DJ web app with Google’s Gemini + ChatGPT. It’s an HTML page that I load locally into Google Chrome with keyboard and midi controls.

I need this to make mixes of my HUNTERTHEN music, available to those who buy the full albums on Bandcamp. I make “soundscapes for your interplanetary commute,” which will either lull you to sleep or help you get your work done.

Next on my shopping list is something like this, the GRID3 PBF4 4-Button + Pot + Fader MIDI Controller. I really only need two sliders, but having four will be nice, and the extra buttons can be mapped to start / stop each track.

WAKE UP, IT’S STILL BURING DOWN

From my interview with Thought Enthusiast in 2024:

I love seeing the mask pulled off from this big corporate con-game, where these platforms made it seem like a good idea to outsource our audience and community building on their spaces rather than our own. They got us hooked on the click traffic, then turned the screws and made us pay to reach our own audience, and then oops, now we’re all sort of waking up and seeing that we built our brands and systems in a house of cards, and the shit is falling down real quick.

Read the full interview here.

OUTSIDE WITH FRIENDS WITH CAMERAS

So good to have Bradley Spitzer in my neck of the woods.

BEFORE 1000 TRUE FANS

I started my Social Media Escape Club newsletter in 2021 with an imported email list of 19 people.

Maria Popova started Brain Pickings “in 2006 as an email to seven friends.”

These days I have 6,600 email subscribers, the biggest email list I’ve ever had.

Then I have around 100 paying members, which is also the largest paying membership I’ve ever had.

There’s a big distance between zero and Kevin Kelly’s “1000 true fans” dream, but it all starts somewhere, one person at a time.

There’s no one-size-fits-all path, I don’t think, because everyone we serve is human, and as humans we’re messy and unpredictable. So when people ask me about finding their “1000 true fans,” I usually ask if they found their 10, or their 50 yet.

You’re gonna learn so much with the smaller groups of people, lessons you’re going to need to learn before you even think of hitting 1000.

BLOGGING IS TOTALLY NOT DEAD

From Josh Spector on LinkedIn (thanks Sarah B. for letting me know):

Blogging isn’t dead – it’s hiding.

Last night I spent a little time seeking out old school blogs and was pleasantly surprised at what I found.

Bloggers I had read regularly decades ago like Jason Kottke and Tina Eisenberg are still at it and still sharing interesting, valuable stuff I hadn’t seen elsewhere.

And I discovered bloggers who were new to me that immediately captured my attention – people like Seth Werkheiser.

I was even reminded that bloggers who I do still read regularly like Seth Godin and Austin Kleon have tons of stuff on their blogs that I had missed.

Equally interesting is that most of these bloggers are barely – if at all – using social media.

It’s funny, because I wanted to reply, but I don’t have a LinkedIn account anymore! I tracked down his email to say hello.

Absolutely humbled to have my name anywhere near the other names he mentioned in this post, sheesh! Like, what?!

But yeah – blogging was at one point deemed dead by the VC bros who bought up a bunch of the blogs we used to read, crammed them full of ads and pop ups, then wondered why no one visited anymore (I was living in NYC and working at AOL Music in 2008, I’ve seen things).

Then the VC and content moved to social media because it was a “cleaner reading experience,” and well, we’ve all seen how that turned out!

I set up this blog in 2018, and I’ve been “re-stocking it” with posts and photos dating back to 2004 from Flickr and assorted outlets. I figured since I deleted all my social media profiles, I might as well have one space for everything I’m doing.