The archives are all well and good, but even among the early web, being social is what it was all about. You went to a website to explore, and that website would link another website. Affiliates were common, and webmasters would contact each other to be listed on each others’ sites. If a webmaster found a site they liked, they’d pop it up on their links page as a bookmark and others would be able to check it out, too.
I think there’s still merit in doing that. This section of the website was inspired by Marginalia’s piece on the Web Discoverability Crisis, a brief yet eye-opening treatise on the death of the linklist and bookmarks page and what we can do to support each other. In his own words:
A proposal, dear reader: Create a list of bookmarks linking to websites you find interesting, and publish it for the world to see. You decide what constitutes “interesting”….A hyperlink isn’t a marriage proposal. It is enough to find some redeeming quality in a website to link to it. It costs nothing, and helps bring traffic to pages that you yourself think deserve it.
…If we actually want these small websites to flourish as a healthy community, we need to promote each other much more than we do. It is advertisement, yes, but in earnest. I like it when other people link to my stuff. What sort of hypocrite would I then be if I only ever linked to my own websites?
So, why not? I’ve found plenty of interesting places to go on the web throughout my time there, sites that are still up, and in some cases still active. Sometimes they’re blogs of friends, sometimes websites that meant something to me growing up, and in some cases sites I found through Marginalia’s search engine (which is, of course, also linked to in my link list). Linking a site doesn’t mean I endorse all the content on it, just that I think it’s an interesting place to explore for one reason or another. If browsing and reading all my little comments doesn’t amuse you, feel free to click the button below to go who-knows-where!
Happy browsing!