Last month brought us the Grammys and the Oscars and their respective in memoriam rolls, where we remember artists who had passed on in the past year. Why doesn't someone do that for the Web, I thought? And honestly, maybe someone does. Maybe they even have a video, with an appropriately somber musical score.
Well, it's not exactly a video, but I will have a post every day here this week with some Websites that closed up shop in the past year. And if you really need the somber score, here's a link to Barber's Adagio for Strings.
Memepool was first important curator site that I can remember, and certainly the first one that I bookmarked in Netscape Navigator and visited every day. Curators (borrowing a term from Warren Ellis) are the sites collecting the odds and ends of the Web and putting them on display. Many of the most popular and influential sites on the English Web today are curators: Boing Boing, MetaFilter, Drudge, Kottke, Huffington Post to a certain extent. The editors of those sites (or in MeFi's case, the users) are collecting interesting content from around the Web and excerpting it, together with a hyperlink to where you can find the original. Curators are often the taste makers of Web culture, pointing to emerging trends and exposing them to wider audiences. If you're tired of LOLcats at this point, you know who to thank.
It's tempting to compare Web curators to 60 Minutes and its old media analogues, but those programs are engaged in journalism to a degree that Web curators usually aren't. A curator is a cross between the TV Guide listings, Time Out, and a safari guide.
I think I started reading Memepool at the very end of 1998*. I was 19. I can't tell you how I got there, I forgot that long ago. I remember thinking that I had never seen anything like it. Memepool (which is practically identical to how one found it 11 years ago) had a very distinct look at the time.
It was these link-filled paragraphs; something that we're accustomed to now from Wikipedia and a style that MetaFilter aped later. Memepool was the first site I had found that took the single most important property of the Web - hypertextuality - and just ran with it. Every Memepool post was surrounded by a flood of context at a remove of one or two clicks.
The tone was doggedly irreverent. The cheeky tagline under the header changed with every reload. For years there was a link in the footer to a somewhat dubious tribute to Memepool (NSFW?) that had appeared in the webcomic Jerk City.
Memepool had a whole host of editors, but honestly I only remember a few. Fatherdan, who seemed to be reassuringly nerdy about the same kinds of things that I was: politics, movies, religions. Yoyology, whose posts were reliably dense with links. All of the contributors seemed to read Achewood, like I did (and still do). Memepool felt like home.
There was no clear ending for Memepool, no last "thanks for the memories" post. Activity slowed down significantly in 2006 and 2007. Riotnrrd, one of the two founders, left a discouraging post on his personal blog and then never appeared again**. In all of 2008 there were three desultory posts, the last one at the end of April. There was no RSS feed for Memepool (you might as well have put a GPS in your '57 Chevy), so you actually had to go to the site itself to check for updates. Last summer, I stopped checking.
Curators are less important now - with accouterments of the modern Web like Twitter and Google Reader, everyone is a curator. A list of links shared by your friend on Facebook are likely to be more compelling to you than those of some strangers. And the Web is a more familiar place now, much of its mystery gone. We'll never have another Mahir, probably. Andy Baio is never going to work for weeks to find the Star Wars Kid again. You don't need a safari guide for a place so well-trod. And in some ways, that's a shame.
*There's a link in this archive (ctrl-F for it; Memepool is so old, you can't direct link to individual posts) to a discussion of the different political theories on display in The Smurfs, the first Memepool link I distinctly recall. I thought that was so clever that appropriated that bit as my own back in '98. Thanks, Memepool, for contributing to my teenage pretension.
**The other founder was Josh Schachter, the developer behind Delicious.
tonight, i visited memepool for the first time in about 3 years. after a few moments, I realized the dates of the links were several years old... i wondered what happened, i found your blogpost & it gave me all the info i needed. thanks. I happened upon Riotnrrd's post before your blog, and his blog was incredibly discouraging/cynical/depressing.
Posted by: jim | 22 September 2009 at 10:05 AM