This is an older version of this story, from 2019. Here's the latest version, from 2022. cripes does anybody remember Google People— qntm (@qntm) 21 August 2019 it existed for like fifteen minutes between Orkut but before Google+, and had the wildest features ...

Most websites today are built like commercial products by professionals and marketers, optimised to draw the largest audience, generate engagement and 'convert'. But there is also a smaller, less-visible web designed by regular people to simply to share their interests and hobbies with the world. A web that is unpolished, often quirky but often also fun, creative and interesting.

I first went online in 1995, back when you paid by the hour for an extremely slow connection. At the time, my concept of the internet only went as far as what America Online would show me. Actual websites existed, of course, but between the slow speed and my unfamiliarity, I mostly stuck with chat rooms,span class="readmore"a href="https://dinosaurdracula.com/blog/old-internet-junk/"Read More/a/span

The artifacts of internet life are personal—that is, not professionally or historically notable—and therefore worthless.

It took nearly five years into the internet’s life before anyone made a concerted effort to archive it. Much of our earliest online activity has disappeared.

Features Christopher Robin's Winnie-the-Pooh Character Guide, Topher's Breakfast Cereal Character Guide, Incredibly Useful Information, family-safe content, and educational resources of interest to kids of all ages.

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NEWS FLASH: PLANES CRASH INTO WORLD TRADE CENTER, PENTAGON. Our link to CNN works (thanks Metafilter). We have news and pics in comments section, if you have any post it there

Plane crashes in to the word trade center. Apologies for not linking to anything besides the main CNN page but there are no full stories on this yet. The plane crashed into the building about six...

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Is there such a thing as Weird Twitter? Earlier I wrote a blog post based on my (non-participant) observations of a Twitter subculture. Recently, there’s been some activity around it in the t…

For some time I’ve been following an emerging subculture on Twitter. I have referred to it occasionally as “stoner Twitter poets”, but as it attains consciousness of itself as a p…

How I built myself a simple wiki using folders and files and published via Jekyll

Accurate pronunciation by text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis is very important in many contexts, and critical in education, publishing, communication, entertainment, among other domains. TTS has become an important technology for providing access to digital content on the web. Yet there is no way to markup content today that will correctly present TTS generated output across commonly used TTS engines and operating environments.

Make the web yours.

Today the book is already… an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index. - Walter Benjamin

Exploring ways to build social infrastructure around books and reading on the open web

This is my bag of tricks — loose notes, design patterns, rules-of-thumb, tools, cheatsheets, gimmicks, leverage points, descriptions of systems, key questions, risks, and unknowns.

pMeta page describing Gwern.net site ideals of stable long-term essays which improve over time; idea sources and writing methodology; metadata definitions; site statistics; copyright license./p

I first got online in 1993, back when the Web had a capital letter — three, in fact — and long before irony stretched its legs and unbuttoned its flan

Building personal learning environments across the different time horizons of information consumption