About

👋 My name is Lauren. I live in Madison, WI, and am originally from West Lafayette, IN. I’ve worked in telecommunications and digital marketing for 25 years and in higher education for over ten years. You can find me @flotisserie here, there, everywhere.

“The street finds its own uses for things.”

📝 About the site

This is a link blog where I collect readings and reflections. Opinions are my own, comments are welcome. Even better: start a blog and tell me about it.

• This site is published under the POSSE model: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. The backend is powered by Micro.blog, an independent blogging platform built around the open web.
• What does that mean in practice? I post here, cross-post to Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads, and when you reply to my posts on Bluesky and Mastodon (TBD: Threads), your posts are syndicated here as a comment. Additionally, you can subscribe to this feed using RSS.
• Subjects on this site include: new media, web culture, online communities, blogging, moderation, indie web principles, open source tech and related social dynamics, AI and the trust gap, digital accessibility, technology, fiber art, music, pop culture, policy, politics, social marketing, and federation as a web organizing principle. And probably Donna Haraway.
• I tend to circle the subject of semantic writing/code environments and how they build information architecture, while thinking back on my time producing sites on the early web. This site is ultimately collecting stories and strategies about reading and learning, alongside emerging technology. You won’t benefit if you don’t click around.

Nerd out with me: Check out the link library, an internal, sortable, filterable URL library that updates with every post. Unlike a traditional archive or blog roll, it centers outbound links, turning blogging (sorry) into a dynamic annotated reading list on various subjects: who I read, whose work I revisit and the various threads I follow. On a human internet, your name and expertise lend provenance, and readers trust your recommendations precisely because you made them. This format (sorry) asks you both to ignore me and to come look over my shoulder.

➡️ Question or suggestion? Talk to me.
➡️ More: “What is this site and why am I doing it?"

⚡More about me

I founded, produced, and wrote for Feministe.us, one of the oldest major online platforms for women. From roughly 2001 to 2011, I was a prominent political blogger, and Feministe was a central platform of the third-wave digital feminist movement, covering the intersection of gender with American politics, culture, tech, journalism and new media alongside sites like Feministing and Jezebel, receiving over 100k hits per day at our peak. What set Feministe apart from that cohort was our explicit commitment to being not-for-profit and our focus on building a community of like-minded thinkers online, within the domain of “women’s rights” and all 🫠 that entails. Many of our peers balanced their editorial direction with VC investors and advertising dollars; we didn’t. Feministe ran as a collaborative, collective project, with a dozen regular writers and several hundred guest contributors over the years, many of them names you’d now recognize in major publications. Did we get everything right? Heck no, but it was important work all the same.

During this era, I also worked as a front-end web developer for other prominent writers and bloggers on early web publishing tools, including Movable Type, Blogger and WordPress. If you follow the news, you know several of those folks by name.

I’ve done several dozen interviews and appearances associated with that time:
➡️ Oral History of the Blogosphere: Lawyers, Guns & Money (2022) → This podcast covers the technical details required to run a massive, free platform on the early social internet. While you’re there, listen to the rest of the series.
➡️ How the Internet Killed Feminism (2019) → A 2019 Jezebel article on this blogging cohort and its impacts, including some of the social and emotional costs of hosting intense public discourse.

🎨 Other
➡️ How Digital Rhetoric shaped my approach to the internet and digital communications.
➡️ Which quarantine house are you? → The silliness of going ultra-viral.

I love great music, excellent music writing, and a good mixtape. Remember to support independent media, student media, and local artists. Hug a teacher, salute a librarian. Know your admins’ names.

In 2023, I was proud to exhibit a quilt at the Los Angeles art gallery Gallery 1988, in a show curated by Wustitch. A working artist purchased the quilt, and it is now on permanent display at Lala Gallery in Lafayette, IN.

💀 Google Reader is my Roman Empire.