Exciting like the web

Sometimes I think about writing a post for too long and then I take too long to write it and it bogs down in endless paragraphs that leave me sick of the sight of my own words before I can finish it and I’m falling asleep just writing this parag

OK, this is me trying to write this post as quickly as possible.

I’ve told a few people recently that Kicks Condor, which I came across via Things Magazine, is my new favourite website. It looks great (more interesting than the current standard of slick, bland templates), he finds loads of fascinating personal websites that give me faith that the quirky individual web is still alive, and he experiments with interesting projects (e.g. a recreation of Muxtape on Dat, prototyping a new kind of RSS feed reader, and Slaptrash for making Flash-like webzines).

Something about the site reminded me of Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom from the late ’90s (here’s an archive.org version). I’m not sure precisely why, but something about the attitude and the ability to explore (sorry, “surf”) the web and find things that make me think, “yes, this, this!” or “oh, that’s totally new to me!”. It’s hard to recall exactly how exciting, special and useful Robot Wisdom was twenty years ago when weblogs weren’t really a thing (Barger coined the term). But it was.

Recently Kicks Condor posted a nice bit about my site and my blogroll which I’m obviously chuffed about. I wish I’d noticed his earlier mention of my site (also very flattering) because then I’d have found his site sooner.

When I saw that, it reminded me of the first time I heard of Robot Wisdom, which is when Danny emailed me in April 1999 to tell me a site that I’d made was linked to:

the haddock directory just got a mention on my favourite Webpage, http://www.robotwisdom.com/

That was exciting, like this, like the web.