Seasons: A Fine Way To Structure a Website or Blog in 2025

Borrowing a concept from podcasting, I'm introducing 'seasons' of content on Cybercultural. From season 1 in 2019, when I began this as a newsletter, to the current season 4 focused on dot-com.

By Richard MacManus | | Tags: Notes

seasons

One of the innovations of podcasting is its concept of "seasons," which originally comes from the world of television. The idea is that you have a time-bounded series of podcast episodes — sometimes with a set theme, but other times the season boundary is simply a given time period.

I first became aware of 'seasons' in podcasts with Serial in 2014, which used the term to indicate a series of episodes on a certain topic. Each season (there have just been 4) starts an entirely new storyline. But another podcast I enjoy, by the writer Bret Easton Ellis, has "seasons" that are demarcated by calendar years. He's currently in season 9, which began on January 7, 2025 (season 8 ended December 31, 2024).

What I'm doing with Cybercultural seasons is a mix of those two approaches. I have different topics each season, which tends to run for roughly a year (give or take some months). Here's how I've defined seasons 1-4:

  • Season 1, May 2019 to February 2020: The intersection of technology with the cultural industries. This was the Substack era of Cybercultural, when the goal was to make it a subscription newsletter. I sent out 77 editions of this newsletter, 15 of which are articles that I deemed fit to bring across to the current Cybercultural archives (you can find them in the 2010s category).
  • Season 2, December 2020 to December 2021: Web Development History in the 1990s, with a few pre-web history posts. These posts originally ran on a tech blog at the URL webdevelopmenthistory.com. After failing to make it as a pro newsletter writer in 2019 and 2020, I just wanted to return to writing about my core passion for web history. So that was my 2021 project, which actually began just before Christmas 2020. All of these posts are in Cybercultural now (see the WDH timeline).
  • Note: there is a time gap here, mainly because I moved with my family from New Zealand to the UK in 2022. Sometimes life intervenes! Also, I was writing the content that would eventually become...
  • Season 3, October 2023 to December 2024: My Web 2.0 memoir (2000s - early 2010s) It took me just over 14 months to serialize my memoir, about creating and running my Web 2.0 tech blog, ReadWriteWeb. You can view all the posts in the book's table of contents.
  • Season 4, January 2025 to December 2025: Dot-com and the birth of digital culture (1990s - early 2000s) YOU ARE HERE. We're in the middle of season 4, which began in January when I started posting a weekly series of articles about the dot-com era. Many of these posts are derived from a book I wrote last year, about the birth of digital culture (a kind of prequel to my Web 2.0 memoir). I finished the draft book by the end of 2024, but I decided it would make a better series of posts on Cybercultural than an actual book. Take a look at the Dot-com category for the latest posts; and here's the first 1994 one, about interactive CD-ROMS.
  • Season 5, January 2026 - TBC: I already have an idea for the next season, but I am still plotting it out.

I think this way of thinking about Cybercultural's information architecture works, at least for me as the site proprietor. As a (free) subscriber of my content, I think it'll also make sense for you too, going forward. I haven't yet made seasons a part of the navigation structure, as I think segmenting content by eras (dot-com, Web 2.0, 2010s) works best for now. But perhaps I will add the seasons to the website structure in due course.

Regardless of whether or not it's part of this site's visible structure, I do think the 'seasons' approach to running a website / blog is an interesting twist on the traditional way to order a blog — reverse-chronological. Perhaps the seasons concept has more in common with the digital garden pattern for websites in 2025? Let me know your thoughts on Mastodon or Bluesky.

Update, 30 July 2025: I have now added seasons to the site's navigation, via the tagging system.

Feature image: Ales Krivec via Unsplash.

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