I learnt today that a friend of mine had set up his own personal website. He built it on Notion and linked a domain name to it. That set of Notion pages has a surprising amount of information on it, including what appears to be the beginnings of a knowledge base of the areas he’s built a career in.
His Notion pages have collapsible sections, text, images, embeds, multiple columns – the works. This is by a person who, from what I know, has not had previous experience with WordPress or Weblow or the like.
What Notion has done is simple and yet profound. It has made it super simple to put high quality, information-dense web pages online.
If you are technically adept, you can buy a domain, hosting, install WordPress, a theme or two, a few plugins like Elementor and build your web pages. If you have enough money, you can hire an agency to build a site for you – and train you to add/edit information on it. If you’re the leadership of a company in charge of public-facing properties, you can get a team to build it for you (well, for the company).
But if you’re outside of a fairly narrow set of people, the web is read-only for you.
That’s why social media became such a big deal. It gave everyone an input box and a send button that published to everyone on the Internet. You could fill that box with text, pictures, sounds, whatever you wanted.
But social media is linear, post-oriented and reverse-chronological. As are WordPress.com, Medium, Substack, Revue – all of which are holdovers from the blog era.
For true self-expression, you want to be able to create free-form information. Notion makes that possible. And makes it look pretty, so you aren’t distracted by themeing and customising looks-and-feels. You just focus on how you want to present what is important for you to say.
It does look like the future of publishing.
End note: we’ve spoken time and again about owning your data. Notion is not that. Whatever its data export capabilities may be, it’s still a proprietary format hosted on a third party service. Yet for most people, the benefit of self-expression and one’s own unique online presence is a powerful motivator. And you know what – that might be a good enough trade off for now.