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The #homepage (tries to) strikes back. What's your favorite homepage? After discovering the creative whisperer, Rick Rubin's Squarespace colab website Tetragrammaton (https://lnkd.in/eqiK4mNz), it brought home the renewed importance of the homepage that I've felt over the last few months. Go there and see this radical presentation of a website — bare bones, just the work — no ads, no snag-me-up pop ups, no neon, or megaphone headlines, or links out to social media or pleas to click, subscribe, and pay. #Nothirst is another way to put it. "The platform never seeks your attention and hopefully, because of that, it earns your attention," Rubin told Fast Company earlier this year. What if homepages — content creators — created with this type-of intention? I'm not sure a world absent of #marketing is the right way. If I write a book, I still want the bookstore to sell it, even put it on a table, let me talk into a mic; hold a champagne, poetry slam; meet other authors, etc. But there is something to be learned here on the investment into a homepage — being a unique place to hangout. How do you find out about the hangouts? (How to discovery?) Especially in an age when platforms are shuttling less-and-less traffic to links, and now Google with their #AI overview search results. "As AI has come for search, products like Perplexity and Arc have come under scrutiny for combing and summarizing the web without directing users to the actual sources of information," David Pierce writes in Verge (https://lnkd.in/emaUuwr4). #Search is giving you less reason to go to that homepage. A sandy problem to hold, but it's fun to imagine a way of creating a new infrastructure of the internet. Almost like the internet needs new roads, bridges, signs, town squares, public transportation. (#fediverse is one idea), I can't resist writing about this without sharing some my favorite homepages (there are more, these ones just came to mind): Buzzfeed news all grown up and taken somewhere else with Semafor; a literary feast in Flaming Hydra's (https://flaminghydra.com/); The revenge-of-the-blog site Defector Media LLC; the very-busy but fun The Verge; education-led OpenCulture; Dirt, the tasteful collection of writing on culture (https://dirt.fyi/); sprung with energy ilovecreatives. What are yours? Lastly, more stuff to chew on: 1️⃣ Culture writer Kyle Chayka's #NewYorker piece "Revenge of the Homepage," is the inspiration for the headline here. Kyle has a sharp eye for trends and where taste comes from — check out his book Filterworld, too. 2️⃣ Nilay Pital's conversation with Squarespace's CEO Anthony Casalena on Decoder podcast: (https://lnkd.in/eGZ-an8j). 3️⃣ Rewilding the internet by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon in Noema (https://lnkd.in/eBS3zHTH)
