because, well.
from the Zettelkasten website:
Luhmann’s Zettelkasten is a collection of notes on paper slips with a special twist: It is a hypertext that he could navigate the drawer cabinet containing all the paper slips with a reasonable amount of time and energy. “Reasonable” means that it was reasonable for Luhmann, who, obsessed with his theory of society, was a workaholic and an enthusiastic bureaucrat. A hypertext needs to be surfable. On Wikipedia, you just need to click a link to get to the next article within Wikipedia’s hypertext. It requires more effort to follow a link if the hypertext is paper-based. The other problem is that you need a starting point for your ride. So Luhmann created his Zettelkasten to make his note collection surfable. He needed entry points and a mechanism to surf from one note to another in a productive way.
but that's beside the point. The description here is broadly applicable.
surfing leads to connecting things you wouldn't otherwise connect, the accidental/automatic discovery of context before content. lurking and community develop as people strolling past generates the web equivalent of "foot traffic".
Which is precisely what the corps have been tearing off limb by limb. Not just online, but also in the last 40 years of sub/urban planning.
This is far from the first post I see here about "bringing back webrings and lists of links", and I agree with them each and everytime, but this is the first time I've considered the "professionnal" use of it.
What if, on my website (adricure.fr, which I need to rework at some point), there was a list of other artists.Friends whose business I want to see florish, peers whose craft I like.
It seems so counter-intuitive for the place that hosts your portfolio, the thing that gets people to look at your work and hire you, to say "check out these other cool artists who you could hire instead", and yet!
What if my site showcased a sense of community and pride in my peers, instead of individualism? It wouldn't even take that much space. What if?
Not to mention, lately I've been thinking of engaging in another creative business (I'm keeping the specifics vague until I'm closer to doing it), one that is niche and different and would require an entire different website.
I know no one in that community (I mean, I follow people whose work I like, but nobody knows I exist), and I already know that to get noticed I will need to network, an activity that feels so shallow and hypocrite that I already hate the idea of needing to do it (and yes, I know, "good" networking is something that's supposed to happen naturally as you naturally engage with people. But I have limited social spoons and so that's never seemed to work that way for me).
I'm thinking of a web where I don't need to befriend every other professionnal in the niche, just aknowledge that I like their work and maybe get aknowledged back, and then if friendships do form it's independently of marketing needs.
I don't know if we have the power to bring that web forward again, but it sure is nice to thik about.
adding this as a share and not a comment because I think it's it's own thing, but:
web rings and affiliate/blogroll link lists are a stopgap that's currently available and easy to access, but high manual upkeep and hard to represent more than a handful of links.
RSS sorta solves this, but it's more work, and requires people know about it, and requires people still do a lot of manual labor for curation instead of like, thumbs up/down or only slightly more.
<apollo 13 voice> our low bar should at the very least be getting something like RSS to fit into the same amount of energy expenditure and ease of use as web rings for a group of 20
I'm now stuck imagining something like server side open rss reader that the blog owner can aggregate, but it remembers what articles you've read across websites thanks to a cookie and whatever magic sets hyperlinks to "read" (purple) in the browser, and only serves you new ones from the lists (unless you set it to show unreads)
