One Amazon influencer makes a living posting content from her beige home. But after she noticed another account hawking the same minimal aesthetic, a rivalry spiraled into a first-of-its-kind lawsuit. Can the legal system protect the vibe of a creator? And what if that vibe is basic?
If there was a TV show about the work and lives and oh so many struggles of online influencers, similar to what Silicon Valley was for the Californian start-up world, this beef alone would be enough material for an entire series. You can’t make this up.
— Soon to be released: The Internet Phone Book, “a physical directory for exploring the vast poetic web. It features the personal websites of hundreds of designers, developers, writers, curators, and educators.”
From writer Joan Westenberg comes a digital zine reflecting on how the internet has evolved over the past 20 years. Packed with nostalgia for the early days of niche communities, amateur content and anonymity, it explores the current state of corporatization, algorithms and pressure to constantly produce.
This zine is for anyone feeling disillusioned by the internet’s lost potential and hoping to rediscover that early excitement of possibility. It asks the question - can we build a digital future that reflects the diversity, creativity and joy we glimpsed online in the past?
Nothing helps me rediscover the early internet’s excitement of possibilty more than a three-step process asking me to provide my email handle and full address to access a free PDF. Apparently a simple download link, you know the ones we had in 1998, isn’t enough. How am I supposed to take this seriously?
Tuesday, 30 January 2024
— Pong Wars is utterly mesmerising. I’ve had it running on my second screen to find out which side wins. Day had night down to 70 squares but then night bounced back.
In an interview over video chat, Mr. Rader asked to be presented with a batch of sports photos so that he could be tested on the spot.
Amid a series of uncanny comparisons, Mr. Rader needed about 2.7 seconds to match a photo of “The Catch,” Dwight Clark’s touchdown reception for the San Francisco 49ers in the 1981 N.F.C. Championship Game, to “The Intervention of the Sabine Women,” an 18th-century painting by Jacques-Louis David.
Wednesday, 24 January 2024
— Old’aVista is a search engine for the old web. Enter keyword and it returns links to sites archived on the Wayback Machine and The Old Net. (via)
Before, going online had felt like being a solo hiker, exploring unknown territories. Now I felt like I was putting out a billboard for myself on the highway.
— The internet isn’t fun anymore, writes Millenial Max Read, because Gen Z is now running the show. As someone who just about qualifies as a Millennial (it depends on who you ask), I have to say the internet hasn’t been much fun since about 2010. I experienced the same generational shift then, from personal websites and blogs to rapid-fire social media posting and superficial lifestyle internet celebrities.
Personal sites—and, more broadly, our digital lives—are a mirror of who we are. Some of us will try to neatly organize everything under one hyper-curated digital roof while others will scatter things around on 12 different domains and 24 services. Some will design a site for themselves and not touch it again for a decade while others will feel the need to redesign every 6 months. Those are all right answers to a question that doesn’t have wrong answers.
Just as there are no rules for blogging, there are no rules for the personal website. Go with your gut and build a site you love. And if you don’t like it anymore in six months, make a different version of your site.
The beauty of personal projects is that no marketing manager prescribes your site’s content. There’s no design director who sends frantic messages at 6:34 on Friday because you deviated from the company-approved design system. And there’s no opinionated engineering manager who you have to fight when you feel like rewriting the backend in a new language.
The only reason we’re having these arguments is because everything we do online is now commodified, thanks to the relentless barrage of mind-numbing bullshit from online personas grasping for attention. But think about it this way: If someone judges you based on a something you made for yourself, is it worth keeping their company?
Saturday, 02 December 2023
— The 88x31 GIF Collection. Last year, I linked to a similar collection of nostalgic early-internet GIFs, but this one has over 4,000 images.
Thursday, 23 November 2023
— From Justin Hall’s links.net to blogs to Twitter, Megan Marz explores thirty years of creative writing on the internet. My lack of nuanced understanding of the English language makes it impossible for me to view dril’s gush of tweets as literature, but, yes, any from of writing is literature. And so we should treat some online writing—certainly not everything—in the same way we treat books: Review, criticise, understand the context and archive.
Thursday, 26 October 2023
— A virtual walk through the history of the internet. Starting in 1982 with the Map of ARPANET, it includes many familiar highlights. The tour finishes in 2007 with Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone, which is a fitting end because it all went downhill from there. (via)
— Kagi’s Smallweb shuffles posts from independent websites, mostly blogs. It’s a nice idea, I love this way of discovering new authors and content.
Kagi also announced that the search engine will prioritise independent content in their search results. It sounds great in principle. I want a Web that consists of more independent and experimental sites, one that is less commercialised. One way to build this is to highlight content independently published content. But it feels wrong. A search engine should provides the most relevant results first, not the ones from writers we likes most because of how they publish.
Thursday, 31 August 2023
— Educational Sensational Inspirational Foundational is a “historical record of foundational web development blog posts.” It’s wild how influential A List Apart was in those early days, it was the go-to source for me when I learned how to make decent web sites.
Friday, 18 August 2023
— People and Blogs is an upcoming series by Manual Moreale, about blogs and their authors:
I’m starting a new weekly series called “People and Blogs” where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. You can subscribe to the newsletter or follow it here on the blog and via RSS. The first interview will go up on September 1st and I’ll post a new one each Friday.
What a great idea, I’m hoping to discover some new sites.
Sunday, 30 July 2023
— All nominations for The Tiny Awards. The sheer amount of really interesting sites fills me with hope that the independent web will survive. But there are also many bland personal sites—who nominated these, the site owners themselves? (via)
— A history of metaphors for the internet. “Surfing seemed like an odd one, an artifact from a very particular time in the mid-1990s when people used terms like “information superhighway” and “cyberspace” unironically. Where did these metaphors come from, and where did they go?” (via)
— Two blogs celebrating how small communities foster connection. First, Manuel Moreale:
Blogs with a handful of dedicated readers, forums with fewer than fifty users, group chats with a dozen participants. Those are success stories. Not becoming huge can and should be seen as a good thing.
We don’t need a million followers. And maybe we don’t need a thousand true fans. But we probably could use ten good internet friends to make our digital life better.
it’s not about how many views you have, how many likes, trying to max all your stats… sometimes a single connection to another human is all that matters.
The smaller the group, the closer and more impactful the connection.
— Back in 2004, I wanted to start a blog. I had been researching blog engines for a while. We had many choices back then. There was Blogger.com, Movable Type, Typepad, and TextPattern. But it was WordPress that allowed me to get things going. It was easy to install; all you needed was a webspace that had PHP installed, a MySQL database, and an FTP client (you do remember those, right?). Its interface was simple, and so was building a theme for your site.
Even with my little knowledge of servers, and computers in general, I could set up a website in one night. WordPress brought the prospect of running a blog on your own webspace within arm’s reach, and it did so for many million other independent content producers.
Wordpress is 20 years old today. To say it revolutionised blogging by making a great product available for free under an open-source license is an understatement. Estimates say some 810 million websites run on WordPress today, that’s 43% of all of the Web. Amongst CMS-driven websites, WordPress has a 64% market share. It’s hard to imagine how many websites were brought to life just because WordPress exists.
And Automattic, the company that maintains and develops WordPress, is one of the few organisations that care about the Web. Automattic makes it easy to move your blog away from WordPress.com. They still support the development of WordPress and implement open standards like ActivityPub to promote an open and decentralised Web.
— Oral history is a method historians employ to gather information about historic events from people who lived though those events. Its goal is to capture additional perspectives different from official historic records like newspaper articles, political speeches, or once secret memos. We’ve seen oral histories from survivors of the holocaust, slavery, and wars, shedding light on individual fates. Pretty heavy stuff, very important work.
Now, oral histories are all over the Web: There’s one for the recently axed BuzzFeed News, one for MTV News, which shares the same fate, and another for Sydney’s declining clubbing scene. Whenever someone sat down with a group of people to interview them to recount the rise and fall of something that was once important to some; it gets the oral-history stamp of approval.
All published within the recent weeks. It could be a case of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Could be a trend too: The international guild of online writers has discovered a way to make headlines sound more profound; to coat reporting of mundane topics with an aura of historic importance.
Friday, 28 April 2023
— Datpiff, a central archive for historical and contemporary hip-hop mixtapes, is pivoting but will hand over its library to the Internet Archive. It’s nice that sometimes good things just don’t disappear from the Internet. (via)
I don’t know whether it’s me getting older or the Internet getting older— but things feel significantly less silly now. Everything is very produced, yet sterile. Everything only exists if it can make money. If it can’t, it either doesn’t get made or dies off.
There was a magical time where it seemed everyone thought this was all experimental. Things were made because they were fun to make. That experimental nature gave us all permission to be weird.
Somewhat related to a recent post on this website.
And Twitter, going to great lengths to live up to its reputation, reacted:
“Graphic designer be like: 8k” — a TV Host/Sports reporter
“Beyond the questionable design, the wording also doesn’t make sense. Who is ‘we’?” — A technology writer.
“It looks like a senior school project from Pratt. There’s nothing aesthetically correct about it.” — a screenplay writer.
“Hopefully we didn’t pay more than $100 for this” — a literary agent and occasional poet.
“Beyond stupid?” — a Writer, Skewerer, Digital Therapist.
“If my 12-year old slapped this together for a school assignment, I would take away her phone for a week so it’s a no for me.” — a rural-mothers podcast host.
“Is this a joke” — the founder of a calendar start-up
“Hmm. A third grader could do better 🥴” — the founder of an obscure social-media startup.
“Is this mess real? It looks like it was done by someone who opened Photoshop for the first time.” — someone who hosts a show on Youtube.
As you can see, none of the comments I picked is from people working in a field adjacent to graphic design; I bet few have the knowledge to assess whether the designer selected an appropriate font, whether the balance is right, or whether the design delivers what the pitch promised. It’s a marketing design, for god’s sake; marketing is always 80% bullshit. I won’t affect anyone’s life. Yet people comment like some politician said they would introduce SUV-free roads when elected.
I love how everyone on the Internet has an opinion about everything all the time.
Tuesday, 21 March 2023
— Tumblr’s poll feature is, and I’m tempted to say obviously, appropriated for a all sorts of things, including games:
— Dave Karpf went through the WIRED archives and dug up the best and most interesting stories published in the magazine since 1993, covering the dot-com boom and its bust, the Web 2.0 era, and everything that happened after. (Via Phil Gyford)
Your personal website is a place that provides immense creative freedom and control. It’s a place to write, create, and share whatever you like, without the need to ask for anyone’s permission. It is also the perfect place to explore and try new things, like different types of posts, different styles, and new web technologies. It is your playground, your platform, your personal corner on the Web.
Personal websites as a place for creativity where you can experiment with design and technology without the constraints of business or clients. I prefer that view over the simplistic reason that you can own your content.
For some, the Web has always been more than a couple of websites with text fields so people can complain or share photos of their faces. In the Web’s early days, if you were online, you’d have your own site. You wouldn’t just consume the medium; you’d actively create and shape it. That part of the Web still lives and breathes, although less prominent than twenty years ago.
These sites exist because of what we do there. But at any moment they can be sold out from under us, to no benefit or profit to the workers—yes, workers, goddammit—who built it into something other than a dot com address and a dusty login screen, yet to the great benefit and profit of those who, more often than not, use the money to make it more difficult for people to connect to and accept each other positively in the future.
We keep losing online communities because they are funded by venture capital. As soon as these companies reach the end of their runway or the investors want some of their money back, their platforms usually deteriorate into a hell hole of attention-grabbing, algorithmically-optimised hot takes, advertising and abuse. It’s the same cycle every time.
And yet, people flock to every new VC-funded website, providing us with a text box to share stuff. Valente, after experiencing a thirty-year rinse and repeat of rising and declining online platforms, writes on Substack. How is Substack different from Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, MySpace or LiveJournal? No one can predict which direction Substack is going in the future, but its owners and investors certainly don’t care about the people and communities they host. Their goal is to become profitable or to find a profitable exit.
Building good technology is hard. It takes time and money. Successful online platforms operate at a scale that is not viable as a hobby. We can only sustain online communities by paying to use the platforms. But even if there was one, funded by the community, free of advertising and algorithms, how long would that last? People’s interests change, their lives change, they spend less time online, they spend more time online elsewhere. Mastodon, at the moment, looks like it’s on the right track. They rejected VC funding to keep the not-for-profit status, and the project receives enough donations so their maintainer earns a salary. But how much of people’s current drive to fund alternative social media platforms is down to Musk’s shenanigans at Twitter?
The only certain, long-term approach to secure an online community’s existence is to build the technology yourself or use open-source software and run the service on machines you maintain yourself.
— Feedland is a new feed reader, developed by RSS veteran Dave Winer, but it’s more than that. It’s an attempt to build a community around feeds, you can explore other people’s feed lists, see what’s popular, and like and subscribe. Ken Smith has a nice write up on Feedland.
— Are We Past Peak Newsletter? The newsletter hype has always been a fad. Newsletters have existed before, and they will continue to exist. For a couple of years, there were enough companies with enough money to throw into marketing campaigns to make people believe emails are cool again. This time, for sure, everything’s different. You will connect with your audience, and this new square to enter words is better than the other squares you’ve used before. Just like blogs, many were started only for their writers to find out that they don’t have enough material for a periodical.