My corner of the web

I was on LinkedIn for nearly a decade and left it around a year ago. I used it as a business card holder; it helped me keep track of where my previous coworkers had ended up, and when I met new people, it gave me a method to maintain a record of them. I have a bad memory for names but in contrast, I have a good memory for faces. LinkedIn was helpful there too.

But LinkedIn evolved over the years and I noticed that a growing part of my contacts was not really relevant to me anymore. What a person needs, after all, is a little village surrounding them. I also felt more disturbed by how my LinkedIn contacts were using AI to publish automatically. I simply didn’t want to be presented with stuff that was generated by a computer—content that I had not chosen to view. So I left LinkedIn, and it was a good decision for me. I still work, in fact I have a new job and still get calls about new opportunities (note: in the whole time I have been on LinkedIn, I've never received a single job offer, not a job, from the platform...). Good ex-colleagues I still catch up with from time to time. Meanwhile, my employer continues to publish whatever messages they want on social media, and it makes no difference whether I am involved or not. But in the last few months I have been thinking that it would be good to have a corner of my own on the internet, a space where I can speak in a style that I like, without feeling that an algorithm decides who sees it, and how I should express myself. And so I started thinking how one could create such a corner. Then one day I found what I was looking for, the IndieWeb community. My youngest daughter plays and sings in a punk band, and the IndieWeb felt like a punk community for the digital age. It's about doing it yourself and owning your own content. And maybe, in the process, sticking a finger up at the huge internet corporations.

This webpage exists for this reason.

Secondly I often meet friends and colleagues (some of whom are and will continue to become my friends) and wanted a way to share a piece of internet information – content I control – with them. When other people share their LinkedIn accounts I can give them a link to this simple page: it displays what I’ve done, what I’m doing now and gives an overview of how I think.

I'm a keen experimenter and always up for new stuff, so I've been checking out AI since ChatGPT first came out. However, no AI writing on the text and content of this site. I do use AI in my employment as a coding assistant to improve my programming skills, which are around that of a nine year old. The same goes for this site. But you can be sure that every sentence you read in this site was authored by humans and not by a sequence of statistical tokens generated by a transposition matrix. My original language is Finnish, thus I write and think more fluently in Finnish. I use Google Translate to translate and sometimes use Quillbot to alter the style of the English text. That said, all the texts you see on the Finnish version of the site are completely free of any software-based editing or change. If I were able to think and write fluent, interesting English, the English version would look like this too; sadly, this is the method I am using for now.

I also want my site to follow the ideas of the personal web. This is where my original content lives and I have full management of my domain. If my hosting company ever screws up or does something unethical, I can move my pages and ideas somewhere else at any moment – or even build my own server in the corner of my walk-in closet to run the site.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not against other platforms, I do have a profile on ResearchGate and a “zombie profile” on LinkedIn with just a couple of lines of content and directions to this page. Other platforms may be valuable to me in some respects, but this site will be the permanent home for my work and thoughts. This site is a work in progress, but it will be a place to gather all sorts of stuff that interests me personally and professionally. Hopefully you find something here valuable for your own career and life.

So you are welcome!