Ye olde web… noveou web

As I start to build up my web presence during, what seems to be the fall of twitter, coming across article like these is heartening.

Glen says:

The hardest thing we can do, but the most vital, is to start building amateur websites again! […]

Building amateur web pages increases the quality of content on the web as well. A status update or a tweet on a huge social network is a lot like fast food; it’s immediately satisfying, but it’s not good for you, and ultimately leaves you feeling empty. But writing content for your own site – something that you feel so passionate about that you needed to build your own site to get it out into the world – is like cooking your own meal from scratch. It’s immediately filling, and satisfying in the long run the way fast food could never be.

But it’s not enough to build our own site. We need to connect to others. Geocities was one of the pioneers of early web hosting, and even though it’s gone, there are still lessons we can learn from it. When you built a site on Geocities your site was sorted into a neighborhood, along with other sites that shared a common theme. This is a concept that we can borrow and build upon. We need to get to know our virtual neighbors and build a community around common interests, linking each other’s websites to form our own microweb of related content.

So seek out new and interesting sites, and link to them on your site. Reach out to them, and see if they’ll link to you. Start a dialog. The way to build a better web is to build a better web of people.