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.

📝 About the site

This is a link blog where I track notable things I read and reflect 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.

• 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.
• I 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.
  

Subjects found on this site may include: new media and publishing, web culture and online community, blogging, community moderation, and indie web principles. I’m also drawn to human dynamics around open source practices, artificial intelligence and digital accessibility, and the intersection of fiber art and technology. I also follow music and pop culture, policy and politics, and social and influencer marketing. And: I’m a genuine nerd about writing and the internet.

➡️ 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. 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. 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 spend time with 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 public discourse.
➡️ Which quarantine house are you? → The silliness of going ultra-viral.

🎨 Other

I love supporting independent media, student media, and local artists.

I didn’t get to see much live music when I was young, so I’m making up for lost time.

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.