Building the web for humans and Blorps
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Read a blorp. Make a blorp. Be a blorp.
The topic that runs through my head the most often these days is publishing on the web. That’s what the web is about, at the end of the day. That’s what it was created for. As a web developer and an author seeking to publish my debut novel, publishing is front of mind for me, pretty much every day.
If you read the blog often, it’s no secret that I’m disillusioned with where things stand right now. If you want to ‘make it’ on the current web, your “best” choice is one of a few platforms controlled by giant corporations.
Nothing sums up my current discontent with the status quo better than the Twitter/Mastodon/Substack Notes/BlueSky/Threads morass that we are embroiled in. A billionaire has decided to stop playing fair, the “town square of the internet” is in danger, and we’ve seen a million white knights on chargers pop up: everyone from idealistic Scandinavian non-profits (Mastodon) to the hot new internet corporations (Substack, Bluesky) to the giants of the web (Meta). Everyone wants a piece of the pie, and it all boils down to money.
That’s fine, but I want to sidestep that conversation. What’s the best way to share the web with other people on the web? Like the old Yahoo directories, how can I lean back into human curation? In some ways, this question is not new at all. Daring Fireball is over twenty years old, and Jason Kottke has been doing curation since 1998. A page with a list of links and short comments is nothing new. I prefer to think of it as re-endorsing an old model.
Where do I “tweet”? Right here, on this website. I wanted a place for short-form thoughts and links that are not the usual essays and original writing that I share on the blog. Each essay that I write gets ‘prime real estate’ at the top of the page for a week, or a month, or however long it takes me to write again, and it didn’t feel appropriate to stick a random link referral in that pride of place. The site wasn’t designed for that.
I hacked together a little weekend project that does things a bit differently. Remember when WordPress was all about short-form content? Mullenweg’s blog used to (maybe still does?) differentiate by different media formats. Having videos and images and text to share was all the rage when Tumblr was the hot internet juggernaut of choice. In a way, I’m trying to recapture that chaotic 2010 energy.
Now, in the vacuum left by Twitter, I’m left wondering where I can best share human-curated links and short thoughts to the world (assuming anyone wants to listen, which is not a given). I decided just to spin up another custom post type on this WordPress blog, and throw up a basic design that’s readable and functional. Enter Blorps.
The web needs more Blorps. I’m not trying to make money with this page. I just want to share interesting articles with an audience. I want to point out other people on the web who are standing up for human creativity (Manuel Moreale comes to mind). So, jump on in. The water’s fine. The web is more fun when nobody is making money off of it. Leave the brands to their SEO optimization and content built for robots, by robots. Come back to a web built for humans.
Why ‘Blorps’? It’s my standard go-to phrase for filler content. When I’m developing, or commenting a Git commit, or expressing a mild expletive when things go sideways, Blorp is close at hand. It seemed an appropriate noun to sum up the type of content I want to post about: cool links and short thoughts. You know, Blorps. If all of human culture can adopt ‘tweet’ (or, heaven forbid, ‘skeet’ or ‘toot’) as a word, I can use ‘Blorp’ and there’s nothing anybody can say about it.
How to Strengthen the Human Web
I have a few thoughts here that may end up becoming part of a separate blog post. Here are a few intentional ways I’ve tried to build support for the Human Web on Into the Book.
First of all, this site’s no longer indexed by Google. If you didn’t stumble across me via somebody that you already know and trust, I probably don’t have much value to you. A random search result is never going to be a good way to find this website. If you know of any human-curated directories that are accepting submissions, I’d appreciate being pointed in the right direction.
For another thing, the webMentions box below is an easy way to track discussion between various websites. You can check out the post “Chronology in a Virtual Space” to see what actual discussion shared between blogs can look like (for my part, this is a vastly superior solution to web comments).
Finally, the Indie WebRing is a “people-focused alternative to the corporate web.” I’m proud to do my part towards discovering other like-minded folks (that’s how I discovered Manu) — just click the left and right arrows in the footer of this website. It’s a great way to find pieces written by people, with a pretty good range of subject matter, and yet an underlying like-mindedness that’s more refreshing than algorithmically-generated recommendations.
Mastodon and other ‘fediverse’ solutions may eventually prove to be part of this solution, but for now, I’m more intent on keeping things organic. The best place to find me, and my writing, is and will always be Into the Book. I’m greedy: I want control over my own platform. That’s the whole point of the web.
Could I make money doing this on Substack? Maybe. Could I find a bigger audience sharing mostly-vacuous links on Threads? Almost certainly. But I’m not going to, because I’d rather have end-to-end control of the experience (coincidentally, that’s why I’m self-publishing my book). I don’t want an “AI-powered” platform telling me that readers don’t resonate with excessive parentheticals and to edit them out (Excessive Parentheticals could be the subtitle of this blog).
You’re here, you’re reading my writing. That’s good enough for me.
(And, one last parenthetical, how did you find me here? I’d love to hear from you).