Once upon a time, the world wide web was just that: a curated web of hand-built connections. I used to love traversing the web: arriving at a site, absorbing what was there, seeking out the bookmarks page, finding it, and going down the list following every link to another world of knowledge, insights, and ideas.
Today our connections have been captured by giant corporate entities that sell them back to us, and we are expected to line up at troughs to be fed whatever slop the algorithm throws at us next.
What are we to do? Our hand-built web, what’s left of it, is in tatters. Many people and groups still have web sites, but the practice of curated connection has been nearly lost.
I believe we can bring it back.
If you have a web site or blog or any other kind of “place” on the internet, you can start building connections to other places. We can build a new web of curated connections that we control and that we can traverse.
I am as much at fault for what has happened as anybody else. All of my web sites used to have long and annotated (and witty) bookmark pages. It was fun to play a part in the connection game. But I stopped doing it when everybody else stopped, gradually, starting roughly in the teens. The best I’ve done in recent years was to have an “other blogs” list on my blog. I recently took that list off the new blog design (as a de-cluttering thing), but I intend to put those links back on this page (plus some more blog links).
As of this writing (April 2026), I’ve just started to build a new bookmarks page. It has been a while since I’ve done it, and I’m rusty. I have a list of people and groups and blogs I plan to link to here, but I have some more curation and annotation work to do before I’m ready to publish the list. Look for it soon.
Let’s play the connection game again. Let’s get our web back.