About

👋 My name is Lauren. I live in Madison, WI, originally from West Lafayette, IN. In this house, we love the indie web.

📝 As Mary Oliver says, “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
📝 This is a link blog, where I keep track of notable things I read and my reflections on them. I use this site to tinker at the edge of the Fediverse, compiling stories related to higher education, tech and emerging digital communication practices in new media and internet culture.
📝 I’m a real nerd about writing and the internet, and currently thinking out loud about the mainstreaming of LLMs and AI. This blog is also my sandbox for experimenting with AI as I learn various LLM tools for my day job. The writing here is mine unless I specifically say otherwise.
📝 This site is published under the POSSE model: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. If you’re reading my posts on Mastodon, Bluesky or Threads, it flows from here. The backend is powered by Micro.blog, an independent blogging platform built around the open web, with cross-posting baked in. When you reply to my posts on Bluesky and Mastodon (TBD Threads), your posts are syndicated here as a comment.
➡️ Question or suggestion? Talk to me.
➡️ More: “What is this site and why am I doing it?"

⚡I founded and wrote for the early blog Feministe.us, one of the oldest major platforms for women online. From around 2001 to 2011, I was a prominent political blogger, and Feministe was one of the primary platforms of the third wave digital feminist movement, covering the intersection of gender with American politics, tech, journalism and new media alongside sites like Feministing and Jezebel. What made Feministe different from the rest of this cohort was that we were explicitly not for profit and focused on building a community of like-minded thinkers online. By contrast, others of our size and shape balanced their editorial direction against VC investors and advertising dollars. Feministe worked as a collaborative, collective project, with a dozen regular writers and several hundred guest contributors over many years, many of whom are names you’d recognize in major publications today. Did we get everything right? Heck no, and still it was important work.
⚡I’ve done several dozen interviews and appearances associated with that work:
➡️ A podcast from 2022, where we cover the technical ins and outs required for running a massive, free platform on the early internet
➡️ A Jezebel article from 2019 on this blogging cohort and its impacts
➡️ Going viral and what it’s like
During the Web 1.0 era, I was also a front-end web developer for other prominent writers and bloggers on early tools, including Movable Type, Blogger and Wordpress.

🎨 I make a habit of supporting independent media, student media and local artists. You should, too.
🎨 I’m a casual fiber artist and practice with middling commitment; however, I am proud to have exhibited a quilt at the Los Angeles art gallery Gallery 1988, at a show curated by Wustitch, in 2023. The quilt was purchased by a working artist and is now on permanent display at Lala Gallery in Lafayette, IN.

💀 Google Reader is my Roman Empire.