Interesting—the ‘make use of’ part really doesn’t apply to what I’m doing because I’m not evaluating links on ‘usefulness’—I want links that are more of an experience or perspective. But I like that you’re doing that in yours. I think it will allow us to compare what draws people in—if that’s even possible.

Themes: Rebuilding the independent web, the web as our social network, alternatives to silos, security and privacy.

With mine, I’m specifically avoiding software and business links—because these dominate Google and already have a lot of directories. I’m not linking to technical posts of any kind, though I do have a section on free sites to use to participate on the Web and Indieweb.

My themes are more: unique sites, colorful sites, bizarre sites (to some extent) and thoughtful sites. I love those pages that I read and they were so profound or beautiful that my life changed just being there.

These first 100 links have been kinda from memory: so software to help a beginner build a website, computer security, better browsers, privacy search.

That’s sweet. I’ve been loving the links you’ve been finding (like millionshort and findx—to which I would add wiby perhaps) and so I will definitely use the directory. Vivaldi has been great—I’m following along, Brad.

On top of this, I have categories that I don’t want to leave blank, stuff I don’t have in my head anymore so I have to dig. Oh the rabbit holes! There are lots of things I need to dig up more on but it can wait till later.

Yeah, so, this is a good topic. I started a few categories that I’ve decided to hold off on. I have an ‘Animal’ category, for instance, but I don’t think I’ve got enough quality material to make it happen yet. I’m close, but I might hold off.

Like you, I found it useful to build my categories first, though. I’m only going two tiers deep. So I have a main category and then the actual category. I don’t put any links right under the top-level yet.

Incidentally, here are the classification systems that I springboard from:

• BISAC Headings List.
• SeekOn—I feel like the categories here are similar to the old Yahoo!'s—not that that’s what I want at all, but it helped to think in terms of why I think this organization doesn’t work.
• Cutter.
• To some extent, Colon—though I could never seem to find a detailed category list here.

I don’t want to overdo the hierarchy, because frankly I expect most people to use the search function anyway.

Huh—I am skipping the search. I guess I’ll have to rethink this. I also have so few links that a lot of searches will draw blanks.

I’m listing both websites and individual web pages (sometimes known as deep links) in the directory. Sometimes both. In essence I’m giving myself the flexibility to say, “I don’t know about the rest of the site, but this one post on blue widgets is brilliant.”

Same. In fact, sometimes I link to just an image or a video and those are marked as such.

A link may appear in more than one category if it is relevant.

I don’t do this—I tend to link to the second category in the entry’s description instead. I do have some meta categories like ‘Blogs’ and ‘Wikis’ that will list all websites of those types from all categories.

I do have some ‘secret’ categories that aren’t reachable from the hierarchy. For instance, I have a ‘Charlie McAlister’ secret section that goes into depth on his life—and which is only reachable from his link in the ‘Visuals/Zines’ category.

At some point I will go back and cross index categories that are relevant to each other.

Cool—not sure I have enough categories to do that. (Probably 30-40 categories.)

Link descriptions: Right now I’m just making sure the description has the keywords in it that are needed for people to find it. I’m not trying to write a review although sometimes I do editorialize.

This is where I go to town. I sometimes include five more links in the description. I am spending a lot of time making these juicy, giving history, including images. I may need to expand some of these into full-page articles.

The directory will be open for submissions at launch. Frankly, I’m not optimistic I will get a lot.

I think we need to look at this as long game. It might be good to give yourself a timeline to work with. Like I am giving Indieweb.xyz a year to see how it goes. I might go for two years. It requires a lot more maintenance and work because people interact with it—it’s not just static HTML.

With this directory, I am committing to 20 years. I am definitely going to keep it up for the long run. It is designed to be a portal to the somewhat permanent Web and it needs to be there longterm in order to work. This means I can play a long game and just build it gradually. Maintaining links is the hard part—but if I keep it small, it’s fine.

I’d really prefer that bloggers add their own blogs and write their own descriptions. For example how do I describe Kicks Condor’s blog or Chris Aldrich’s blog? Blogs like mine and yours and Chris’ are about a little bit of everything.

Well, here’s my entry for your blog so far:

Brad Enslen
https://ramblinggit.com/
Web/Meta Blog 10m
I bounce ideas back-and-forth with this fellow. He blogs about web
directories and web search---but in an effort to understand how else
we could be doing this. Our conversations led me to make this directory.

You might take umbrage with my description—it’s pretty low-key. I try not to pitch a site with too much fervor—if I say that every blog is ‘the best blog ever’ then it’s meaningless. But I also don’t want to judiciously decide that one is the best. I’d rather just say matter-of-factly why I visit a site. (I could see myself saying, “This is THE guy I go to when I want to read about organizing links and enhancing the Web these days.”)

But I think if the description is written by me, it’s more likely to be interesting because self-promotion will always come off as marketing—this entry just comes across as an informal recommendation, like you’d hear in a conversation.

You could also start with the description meta tag on your links.

It’s easy to Duckduck for cooking blogs and find them, but what about blogs that are about every topic under the sun? They are hard to find by keywords but they do need to be found.

Well, this is the advantage we have over Google. We can link to anything and it will be found because it’s never too lost in the directory—since we’re both only in the small hundreds of links.

Finally, there are topics I’m just not interested in or want to avoid: Politics, sex, religion – better served by a search engine. Sports? I can’t be bothered. But this too is cool, because there is room for sports, political and other niche directories. Just as there is room for thousands of small general directories.

Let’s hope!

Cool, cool. Hearing this has made me ramp up my work on mine as well. Looking forward to linking to each other when we get there.

I am nearing 200 links in my directory—that I’ve snapshotted and summarized—and my attitude toward the directory has changed a bit. At first, I simply thought, “Oh, I’ll just put any link in there that I like.” Which basically turns it into a big list of my bookmarks. (Which is fine—if it’s useful to me and helps the sites I really enjoy, then that’s a good angle to start with.)

However, I’m starting to see that I’m actually attempting to paint a picture of the Web—making a map of it, right? And so I’ve started branching out and including stuff that I may not visit all the time and that I may not even like, because I’m trying to show how ‘wide’ the Web is. As a result, I’ve started including a lot of controversial links across the spectrum of humanity—in order to make the directory more about the Web than it is about Me. (I’m a very passive person, so I tend to rule out posting anything inflammatory or controversial, because I have no idea what the ‘right’ side of an issue is and I just would usually rather not deal with it.)

Cool—found your blogroll. This is great! I especially like the links to your diary-x blog. Really wanted to check out your links page from back then, but there appears to be none archived. (I also really appreciate your links to Blot things—was unaware of Blot.)

Ok, this is seriously insane! What a ton of work. Serious respect for your past lives in directory building!

Couple questions:

• How much fanfic did you read while building these? I guess I’m wondering how much of this job bordered on literary critique or editing.

• Scifimatter refers to ‘HipRank’ in the links—what was that? It seems that you used this to order the links.

• You say on Scifimatter that you want to help ‘the surfer’, the ‘amateur and semipro websites’ and—most importantly, perhaps—to ‘encourage fans of SF/F to start their own website’—did this play out? (These are definitely my goals, too—I wonder how to accomplish them.)

Also, I’m a pretty big Godzilla (and monster movie, Kaiju, Biollante) fan, so I loved looking through those links on the Planets Doom. Also, I have to say: it’s impressive that many of the outgoing links in the directory STILL work thanks to the thoroughness of the Wayback Machine! Another benefit of static HTML—even if these directories are static versions of the original dynamic ones.

What a tremendous discovery! I’m really impressed with this and am already finding it useful. I think this is the first search engine that I’ve been excited about in a decade.

You’re doing fantastic work, Brad. New discoveries all the time. Way to surf!

While Tumblr is a type of blog, I think it is sufficiently different to categorize differently—microblogging, tumblelogging. Simply because it generally eschews writing. And that appeals to people.

So, question for you: are you satisfied with a blog for your approach? It seems that you post links, essays and announcements generally. However, these three things are not equal. And to see your essays roll off the front page while links take their place—well, I can see myself wanting a directory of those.

Yes, you have an ‘article’ post type that shows me those essays. But even that list is not comprised of equals. I wonder if a wiki might suit these.

I also wonder if there is a new way to structure all of these thoughts that might do justice to what you are doing and assist the reader in navigating what you are doing. A way of mixing and matching the ‘blog’, the ‘wiki’ and the ‘directory’.

To me, the great failing of blogs is that it is difficult to find the beginning and the end—and I don’t think they facilitate the ‘memory’ of a discussion. A blog post is a thought balloon floating alone. You and I can follow it pretty well, because we are juggling some memories to do it—but someone who stumbles across this post will not realize what is really going on.

Anyway, this is a great post—I’ve been pretty stumped about how to preserve the wee ‘web page’ and this is a thread we’ll need to continue over time.

Ok—understood. So, it seems our group here still has a lot to talk about wrt how to curate links in new ways. (The directories of old seemed really dry and pointless to me—until I started talking to Brad and seeing that directories are still everywhere, but in disguise.)

Alongside that though, continuing your line about DuckDuckGo working with the curators—I think it would also be useful to define how we would envision search participating. I’d rather have us giving them directions than have it go the other way (similar to how RSS was an initiative by bloggers, preferrable to the myriad of APIs that are doled out by the networks.)

I guess I wonder how everyone feels about microformats as part of directories. (I prefer microformats—microsub, for instance—to RSS because it doesn’t require upkeep of a separate document that ISN’T really HTML.) But I can’t ignore that microformats feel clunky and can be implemented 100x different ways…

I also wonder how human curation should play a role in search. (Like—is it possible for curators to hone algorithms—is this already done?)

Yeah, hey, great discussion! Thanks for pointing it out—missed it somehow.

On your points:

1. We, the little people, need to rebuild the web. […] This is the foundation of everything. Yes, cool—you see this at a football game when things get heated and two guys start fighting. Then another guy stands up and says, “I’ll fix this,” and he starts walking down. Oh boy. Sure.

   So, like: not only is another social media site going to solve this, but no one of us is going to have an ‘answer’. TiddlyWiki doesn’t work for me—but h0p3 and sphygmus are doing great things for themselves—and I think there are many people who will be served well by it (as compared to micro.blog).

2. Someplace to go is actually many places built by us. Sweet! I get really excited at the prospect of more places to go.

3. Link freely. This has the added benefit of creating a TON of noise for Google. 😘 If the tradeoff on something is “bad for bots, good for humans,” I’ll take that trade.

4. Discovery, and search, will sort itself out, if we do #1,2, and 3. Trying to decide if I agree with this. I kind of agree with “it’ll all come out in the wash” but I also don’t think discovery gets better than Brad linking to Simon and me reading Simon.

   Once I start relying on a bot, what else is it giving me? And do I begin to get lazy with my discovery effort? And then am I isolated again?

5. We may end up with 5, 6, 10 or more favorite places we go to search and that is good. More and more, I’m finding myself just using Stack Overflow, Pinboard and YouTube search directly. Google just does this anyway. I tend to use Google more as a glorified address bar: ‘indieweb.org author’ and click the first link. I know this will take me to Indieweb wiki’s page on authorship. (So there is a specific page I already know—basically a ‘feeling lucky’.)

Love being a part of this discussion. I am working hard on my directory to finish it—hopefully by end of October. (Again, it’s not a directory people can submit to: it’s my model for the modern Little Web Library. Just trying to get a good amount of links, categories, fun to use, all that.)

I don’t think I connect with you and Brad quite as much on search—it’s one thing to search for ‘rotate div 90 degrees’ compared to searching for ‘aesthetically pleasing blog with poetry’. This is why I’m much more bullish on directories (blogrolls, wikis, that ilk)—if we can link to each other and describe each other to each other—that is another way to get somewhere.

Anyway, I’m not trying to convince you of my perspective, just saying that it’s cool: while you are looking for ‘useful’ and I am looking for ‘fascinating’—and in some ways I’m sure we’re both looking for both—we both want the same type of web. A well-lived-in one.

(Strange that this didn’t show up in my ‘mentions’—wonder what else I am not replying to—)

Even aside from any larger societal impact, I can’t say that anything I have done on social media has been nearly as worthwhile. The past year, since about March, I’ve committed to spending less time on social media, and my creative output is way up.

I think this is so encouraging—maybe the most encouraging thing one can say! Can you point to what is causing this? Is it the feeling of working for yourself, rather than—as you say—giving ‘free labor’ to the CorpASAs?

This is an impressive list! Not because these are very good directories—I struggled to find any new links that were of use—but a) because they are actually still there, b) the categorization systems that some of them use are different, c) some of the most interesting parts are not the actual directory (e.g. the editoral guidelines are useful—they’ve been in this game a lot longer.)

I wonder if any web portals still exist. It was such a fad and—while I never got into them—I wonder if the idea is still plunderable. I suppose the current Twitter/Facebook newsfeed is a progeny.

Ok, I did this - this is great, there are some ‘neat’/‘inspiring’ things there. A few other questions for you:

• How do I find more hashtags? I would have never found #creativecoding - is it known to be a community or is it just an ad hoc hashtag like #lostinthehashtags (which I just made up - but which has posts!) I guess what I’m saying is - I don’t sense that these hashtags are a community - or are they?

• As ‘neat’/‘inspiring’ as these are, they are mostly only (very small) images and (very short) clips. I ultimately can’t see myself using Instagram or Twitter much because you just kind of skim and can’t go deeper. They lack the ‘hypertext’. (This is similarly to the OP’s trouble with this post just being a simple ‘box algorithm’ - where do I go for more?

• Most of these look like art I’ve seen on t-shirts or album covers. Dating back even to the seventies. It is still beautiful and remarkable - but I can’t help but wonder: Where is innovation happening in tech+art?

I will say that I do follow a lot of things happening in vaporwave - any idea what else is happening out there? Thank you for your time, HammadB. I am eager.

Ok, sorry to be delayed in replying to you, Brad. I’ve had a broken blog for about two weeks. Rest assured, I’ve been reading along—around the time it broke, you wrote that Thank God for The Indieweb post and I couldn’t help but feel similarly, given that I started my blog around the same time.

I think you’ve got a great idea here—basically that Webmentions could be used to negotiate between two websites, to legitimize each other.

Maybe ‘nofollow’ links materialize into bona fide links once they each Webmention each other. I like that it could be started up from either side too. Someone who includes my directory in their blogroll is probably a good candidate to be in the directory.

One thing that I love seriously love about Webmentions is that they can just be easily killfiled. On Webmention.io, I can just nuke a mention and it’ll never come back. This means I don’t need any moderation tools built into my static blog, I can just use WIO directly.

So I think WIO is a great tool for a directory like this, because you could just build it in static HTML. In fact, this is what I’ve been doing with my directory—I am generating static HTML from a list of link descriptions. This allows me to easily host the directory aaaaaand now that you’ve mentioned this idea, I can hook up WIO in a few simple lines and have a built-in submission system!

So, yes, be flattered—I am stealing this/have stole. 😘

Holy smokes—didn’t realize this was actually how this played out. I now see more what you mean by ‘sucking the fun’ out of Web1. Thankyou for spelling that out. Haha, now I am angry!!

So, is getting rid of the ‘Gates of Marlborodor’ good? I think it’s similar to my feelings about Yahoo!—I don’t miss having to click down seven levels to get to the ‘smoothies’ topic. (Or not finding it in the hierarchy at all!)

The trouble is: only a human can say if the ‘Gates of Marlborodor’ was useful to them. Google may not be able to tell the difference between a link farm and a link boutique, but a human can—and humans are the ones we’re trying to connect here, not the Baidubots!

One interesting thing to me: as I have been digging and scraping around for sites, using all the search engines and feeds I can find, there is one that I am finding surprisingly useful. The search on Pinboard—which is a bookmarking site, the heir to Del.icio.us. If you type in ‘smoothies’ there, you are going to get much more interesting results.

And it strikes me: I think it’s the closest thing we have to a human-edited search engine! Think of that.

Ooo goodie goodie. Looking forward!

I’m on the Wayback today too, reconstructing a lost site. Fellow packrats unite.

This reminds me of these “useless web” sites—this being the primary one—that have managed to stay very popular. (A lot of YouTubers make videos of themselves clicking through this site and I often see kids at school using the site.) And it’s basically a webring. But it’s not a code-based one, it’s the opposite—it’s totally curated.

(Oh, also, the fellow who does this also works on a directory of “inspiring” projects that looks great. So, this is a person who is having some success playing with curated discovery projects.)

I think computers have completely blown it with discovery. The smartest minds have all been working on this for decades now and it has been a disaster. The question to me now is just: how do we equip our librarians? And I tend to think that we don’t need anything more—our technology is totally under-utilized.

However, there is one promising development that I see from the Microcast.club directory: the self-designed cards that show big images on each entry. The directory is using the itunes:image entry in the podcast RSS feed. This is fantastic because the curator can select/filter the directory entries—but the authors can customize their cards.

I wish RSS stylesheets would have caught on so I could offer this kind of thing for the Indieweb.xyz blog directory.

First off, re: open sourcing Indieweb.xyz—I’m driving toward that. I’m in a private repo on Github right now. But, man. It’s unnerving to open that kind of code when… it’s running live on my server. So I am trying to find the security holes before releasing it.

I don’t have big plans for Indieweb.xyz, but one thing I’m planning on adding is a way to create a whitelisted sub. You basically can make a list of URLs and those are the only URLs that can submit to the sub. Who knows, I might use Vouch for this. I just want to use something that makes it effortless.

I wonder if this might be useful for quick collaboration. Name the sub, link a bunch of websites together and then go to town, sharing stuff.

I also am creating a few themes for people who want to run their own Indieweb.xyz as well, since the one I’ve got is designed for the web at large—clearly not the arXiv crowd.

Cool ideas!

A more advanced solution also scales. Which I would argue is a bad thing!

A large super-crawler ends up taking on the Whole Web. Which leads to a massive directory. Which leads to the big players having the resources to game that directory. Drowning out the individuals again.

If there are 100,000 bloggers, then we need 100,000 blogrolls.

This is the magic of it: Google can’t compete with 100,000 blogrolls. Yes, they can aggregate them. Destroying them in the process.

So, yes, we agree on how decentralized can really give us progress. And I agree that our problems are mostly not technological, but are human problems.

(This is similar to the discussion on decentralization out there that seems to think the answer can simply be solved by new technologies. Dat and IPFS are fantastic, but we can decentralize in vastly more meaningful ways today—but we don’t. We could learn to be better human discovery engines.)

If people began to link again, to read again, to explore again. Less statistics, fewer algorithms. More curation, more editors.

Great stuff today, Brad!