Founded in 1998, kottke.org is one of the oldest blogs on the web. It’s written and produced by Jason Kottke and covers the essential people, inventions, performances, and ideas that increase the collective adjacent possible of humanity. Frequent topics of interest among the 26,000+ posts include art, technology, science, visual culture, design, music, cities, food, architecture, sports, endless nonsense, and carefully curated current events, all of it lightly contextualized. Basically, it’s the world’s complete knowledge, relentlessly filtered through my particular worldview, with all the advantages and disadvantages that entails.
kottke.org has helped influence the design and format of social media on the web since its inception. In 2000, the site introduced the permalink as a deliberate design feature, now the atomic element of social media. kottke.org has been cited in hundreds of books and academic publications and was one of the first blogs covered in major media like the New Yorker. In 2005, work on the site was 100% funded using a patronage model that anticipated services like Kickstarter and Patreon. The launch versions of both Gawker and BuzzFeed were partially based, in design and function, on kottke.org. The site has helped discover and popularize many emerging ideas and media forms, including tumblelogs in 2005, about a year and a half before Tumblr launched.
The Guardian named kottke.org one of the 50 most powerful blogs in the world in 2008. In 2013, Wired Magazine asked me to write about kottke.org for their 20th anniversary issue honoring the people, companies, and ideas that “have shaped the future we live in today”. Slate wrote a robotic blogger to see if the site’s output could be matched algorithmically. Time named me one of the 25 best bloggers in 2013. You can read more about the site on kottke.org.
Jason Kottke designed and developed sites for 3M, E*Trade, Target, and Charles Schwab. Kottke designed Gawker for its launch, including the logo. He also designed a font called Silkscreen, which has been used by Adobe, Volvo, Britney Spears, Herman Miller, and The Bourne Legacy Series.
The work on kottke.org has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Wired, and dozens of other media outlets.
Kottke was an early advisor to BuzzFeed and helped them hire two key early employees. He has also headlined at SXSW Interactive and spoken at MoMA, Ars Electronica, and Webstock. From 2005 to 2006, Kottke was a Senior Fellow in the R&D Lab at Eyebeam. In 2011, Kottke designed and built Stellar (closed down in July 2016) to make it easy for people to discover great things online.