Pinboard (coldbrain)

Endgame for the Open Web

coldbrain — 2026-03-31T19:59:29+00:00

Anil Dash on how the open web is being eroded. At the end he talks about building “good AI” and alternative infrastructures. I wonder what concrete coordination, funding models and incentive structures would enable those projects to scale and compete with Big Tech before the open web’s critical institutions collapse?

The 49MB Web Page

coldbrain — 2026-03-19T06:00:31+00:00

“Viewability and time-on-page are very important metrics these days. Every hostile UX decision originates from this single fact. The longer you're trapped on the page, the higher the CPM the publisher can charge. Your frustration is the product. No wonder engineers and designers make every UX decision that optimizes for that. And you, the reader, are forced to interact, wait, click, scroll multiple times because of this optimization. Not only is it a step in the wrong direction, it is adversarial by design.”

I’m bringing everything back to my website

coldbrain — 2026-03-16T18:07:36+00:00

A History of the Permalink

coldbrain — 2026-02-11T18:51:25+00:00

Permalinks are commonplace on the web. But it took the rise of blogging to codify them, and bring them out into the world. And it all started with a single exchange of blogs.

30 Years of Writing on the Internet

coldbrain — 2026-02-07T11:43:32+00:00

Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?—Asterisk

coldbrain — 2025-12-27T15:55:12+00:00

The decline of criticism might explain the sense that our culture is stagnating. How can we bring it back?

What Made Blogging Different?

coldbrain — 2025-11-09T15:53:34+00:00

My first months in cyberspace (Phil Gyford’s website)

coldbrain — 2025-10-16T12:25:19+00:00

Website Headlines (dotcom)

coldbrain — 2025-04-24T15:32:42+00:00

The Revenge of the Home Page

coldbrain — 2025-03-16T19:05:02+00:00

As social networks become less reliable distributors of the news, consumers of digital journalism are seeking out an older form of online real estate.

Casual Viewing | Issue 49 | n 1 | Will Tavlin

coldbrain — 2025-01-03T13:55:10+00:00

The Hollow Allure of Spotify Wrapped

coldbrain — 2024-12-15T10:22:06+00:00

This year’s recap, with A.I. bots and uninspired presentation, revealed a company that seems chiefly concerned with profit margins and squashing its competition.

We Need To Rewild The Internet

coldbrain — 2024-11-23T08:13:41+00:00

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

Allrecipes, America’s Most Unruly Cooking Web Site

coldbrain — 2024-10-13T06:33:46+00:00

The immensely popular crowdsourced recipe site has an aura of shambolic good will, something between a church cookbook and a fan-run Wiki.

The Oral History of Pitchfork, From the Careers It Made to the Bands It Killed

coldbrain — 2024-07-07T15:52:22+00:00

Witnessing the death of the web as a news medium

coldbrain — 2024-06-24T21:33:17+00:00

a spacebar for the web

coldbrain — 2024-03-20T18:10:44+00:00

What Happened to the New Internet?

coldbrain — 2024-01-20T20:34:12+00:00

Did SEO experts ruin the internet or did Google? - The Verge

coldbrain — 2023-11-06T13:42:43+00:00

The End of the Extremely Online Era

coldbrain — 2023-10-29T16:15:51+00:00

The author predicts the end of the "Extremely Online" era, comparing it to past societal shifts. They argue that our current way of life, with constant smartphone use and social media consumption, is unsustainable and will eventually fade. The author sees signs of this shift already, such as people becoming burnt out and the internet losing its fun and energy. They describe a scene at a pub where no one was on their phone, and predict that the current culture of all day, every day screen time will become passé.

The internet is already over

coldbrain — 2023-04-11T12:57:58+00:00

Building an Interactive Blog Map

coldbrain — 2023-04-04T09:00:44+00:00

Why Bing Is Being Creepy

coldbrain — 2023-02-19T13:41:00+00:00

It’s doing what it was trained to do by reading our stories and absorbing our anxieties. (Not that Microsoft is happy about it.)

Google and Bing Are a Mess. Will AI Solve Their Problems?

coldbrain — 2023-02-18T21:35:16+00:00

The Magic of Small Databases

coldbrain — 2023-01-28T22:41:59+00:00

How WordPress and Tumblr are keeping the internet weird

coldbrain — 2023-01-08T13:34:50+00:00

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg on what it’s like to run WordPress’ and Tumblr’s parent company

How millennials became cringe

coldbrain — 2022-12-21T22:32:20+00:00

The Button That Could Have Changed the Internet

coldbrain — 2022-12-04T09:32:30+00:00

Life After Lifestyle

coldbrain — 2022-10-14T19:29:05+00:00

America as an Internet Aesthetic

coldbrain — 2022-09-24T17:59:29+00:00

TikTok’s Americancore meme critiques cultural appropriation by exoticizing the familiar. Who has the last laugh?

How platforms turn boring

coldbrain — 2022-09-23T23:40:05+00:00

How to tell when a platform is going bad.

How the right is winning the hashtag wars — and how progressives can fight back | Salon.com

coldbrain — 2022-09-09T12:59:23+00:00

The Beginning of the End of Millennial Discourse

coldbrain — 2022-09-02T21:30:00+00:00

What Lies Beneath

coldbrain — 2022-04-22T21:31:57+00:00

The internet is decaying all around us

The Best Way to Learn Online? Be a Lurker

coldbrain — 2022-03-13T09:28:49+00:00

The internet has made me immune to a coherent narrative. In order to truly understand anything, I've taught myself to read networks.

Wordle Is a Love Story

coldbrain — 2022-01-04T20:44:32+00:00

The word game has gone from dozens of players to hundreds of thousands in a few months. It was created by a software engineer in Brooklyn for his partner.

This webcomic made it okay to be sad online. Then its artist vanished.

coldbrain — 2021-11-28T19:19:38+00:00

The author of 'Pictures for Sad Children' went AWOL after a 2014 Kickstarter drama. In an exclusive interview, she explains why.

Spotify for readers: How tech is inventing better ways to read the internet

coldbrain — 2021-09-27T19:00:51+00:00

The market for read-later apps is heating up again, and the apps are much smarter this time.

Let it die

coldbrain — 2021-09-10T03:51:09+00:00

It should be impossible to read Spin in 2021. The URL should either redirect to an elegiac 404, or a tasteful archive of the magazine's glory years. No publication has been treated more viciously by the plundering agents who run the media industry; those psychos who seem uniquely obsessed with distressing the assets of every beloved legacy brand on the web before handing off the baton to the next specious consortium of VC suckers.

The Day the Good Internet Died

coldbrain — 2021-08-02T20:46:02+00:00

How Memes Become Money

coldbrain — 2021-06-15T13:06:35+00:00

Paid in Full

coldbrain — 2021-05-30T20:20:33+00:00

The emerging dream of an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

What the ephemerality of the Web means for your hyperlinks

coldbrain — 2021-05-26T20:53:01+00:00

Hyperlinks are a powerful tool for journalists and their readers. Diving deep into the context of an article is just a click away. But hyperlinks are a double-edged sword; for all of the internet’s boundlessness, what’s found on the Web can also be modified, moved, or entirely vanished. The fragility of the Web poses an […]

OPML files of yesteryear

coldbrain — 2021-05-10T10:50:34+00:00

Wikipedia’s Deep Ties to Big Tech

coldbrain — 2021-04-28T18:53:40+00:00

Contrary to its image as a cash-strapped, transparent public service, Wikipedia is a wealthy NGO with close ties to big tech companies that it tries to obscure

Yahoo, the Destroyer

coldbrain — 2021-04-25T20:43:36+00:00

My Year of Grief and Cancellation

coldbrain — 2021-03-04T21:02:32+00:00

What was I trying to accomplish with my anonymous Tumblr?

The linguistics of hyperlinks

coldbrain — 2021-02-16T13:26:08+00:00

Praxis and the Indieweb

coldbrain — 2021-02-12T13:48:55+00:00

A great summary of the issues re: ‘Indieweb’

Opinion | I Talked to the Cassandra of the Internet Age

coldbrain — 2021-02-09T21:13:11+00:00

The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram

coldbrain — 2021-01-28T15:24:36+00:00

Does monoculture still exist on the internet?

coldbrain — 2020-01-01T21:58:48+00:00

Amazon Alexa and the Search for the One Perfect Answer

coldbrain — 2019-10-15T21:15:33+00:00

Dril or, the Poetry of Online | Tom Whyman on Patreon

coldbrain — 2019-09-10T21:27:38+00:00

The Rise and Demise of RSS

coldbrain — 2019-01-14T15:09:55+00:00

Before the internet was consolidated into centralized information silos, RSS imagined a better way to let users control their online personas.

Why You Should Never, Ever Use Quora – Waxy.org

coldbrain — 2018-12-05T11:44:28+00:00

Forget about Quora's security breach. Their ongoing efforts to block access to their content, including a multi-year ban on the Internet Archive, are reason enough to never use them.

Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet · An A List Apart Article

coldbrain — 2018-07-24T14:10:52+00:00

Breaking down the walls between the internet’s many social silos, Webmentions offer a new level of freedom for web interactions.

Delete Your Account: On the Theory of Platform Capitalism - Los Angeles Review of Books

coldbrain — 2018-04-29T15:43:37+00:00

We researched longer meta descriptions: here are our findings • Yoast

coldbrain — 2018-04-24T13:15:45+00:00

Secondly, we looked at which part of the copy Google used to extract a meta description. In two-third of the cases, Google used sentences from the first paragraph. It’s not a guarantee, whatsoever, but it is a clear indication that writing an introduction for your article should be done with the meta description in mind.

The evolution of linkblogging | Manton Reece

coldbrain — 2018-04-02T21:58:50+00:00

IndieWeb — WordPress Plugins

coldbrain — 2018-01-22T21:12:22+00:00

The year we wanted the internet to be smaller - The Verge

coldbrain — 2018-01-22T15:21:00+00:00

How to Do Things With Memes — Real Life

coldbrain — 2018-01-18T16:58:29+00:00

lamthuyvo/social-media-data-scripts

coldbrain — 2017-09-01T14:16:05+00:00

Smarter Playlists

coldbrain — 2016-07-28T10:38:25+00:00

Combine and filter Spotify playlists

Choral Explanations and OER: A Summary of Thinking to Date | Hapgood

coldbrain — 2016-07-13T14:02:29+00:00

Lines to JSON

coldbrain — 2016-07-09T13:35:10+00:00

Paste some lines of text into the box on the left, and get a JSON array with one element per line in the box on the right. Perfect if you have some text from another source that you want to easily incorporate into a Tracery grammar. Made by Allison Parrish.

What WordPress Theme Is That?

coldbrain — 2016-05-11T09:06:27+00:00

AMBER

coldbrain — 2016-01-28T17:35:32+00:00

Amber is an open source tool for websites to provide their visitors persistent routes to information. It automatically preserves a snapshot of every page linked to on a website, giving visitors a fallback option if links become inaccessible. If one of the pages linked to on this website were to ever go down, Amber can provide visitors with access to an alternate version. This safeguards the promise of the URL: that information placed online can remain there, even amidst network or endpoint disruptions.

Guide to the meaning of Bounce Rate in Analytics

coldbrain — 2016-01-07T12:13:33+00:00