Just when one might think the glorious, joyful, unlimited potential of the internet has cratered to an ad-laden pool of machine generated goop, amazingness happens again.
The odds of what I will lay out here seem improbable. Well, someone can likely do a back of the napkin estimate. While I have hung up efforts to collect Amazing/True Stories of Openness, this would have been one in the past I’d be making a video to add.
The Small Web
It starts, yes, in the regular scroll of my Mastodon feed. I follow a #smallweb tag which provides an ongoing sampling of human crafted web sites that are counter to the ad-crufted, SEO chasing, AI infested corporate crap that has almost ruined the web experience. Or take a better written explanation by Aral Balkan also, a regular #smallweb tagger.
The Small Web is for people (not startups, enterprises, or governments). It is also made by people and small, independent organisations (not startups, enterprises, or governments2).
On the Small Web, you (and only you) own and control your own home (or homes).
The Small Web is the Single Tenant Web
Small Web applications and sites are single tenant. That means that one server hosts one application that serves just one person: you. On the Small Web, we do not have the concept of “users”. When we refer to people, we call them people.
https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/
We all might frame it different ways, I see the smallweb as efforts of individuals to share for the sake of sharing, pursuing their own interests, not for the gain of audience or for profit. It’s far out on the distant coordinates of the Long Tail.
Into the Tunnels I Go
The thing about these journeys for me is that tingly sense of gobs of links, that one might lead me down the lesser traveled web routes into something of interest, that I did not set out to seek.
And that happened when my eyeballs landed on a post by someone I do not follow or know (at the time, Mike Grindle, sharing someone else’s blog post:
That’s something I note- it’s one thing to toot your own posts (I do, yes), but even more giving to post someone else’s, a pass it forward type of thing.
So I end up reading a blog post called This is a Blog by, again, a blogger I’ve never read named Jeffrey Pillow. It resonates, as here I have oft blogged about blogging. I will leave it to the reader here to click away and take in Jeffrey Pillows asserting of what his blog is about.
Yes, it resonated. In message, and as well a poetic flow style of writing.
When that happens, I get curious. Who is this person? What else do they write about? I seek and find the blog’s About page:
My name is Jeffrey Pillow. I’m an American short story writer, memoirist, and poet. On the Internet, you could even call me a personal blogger. I grew up in the small town of Phenix, Virginia, population: 200, and now live in Charlottesville with my wife, two kids, and a dog named Mozzarella Cheese.
https://jeffreypillow.com/about/
For some reason, knowing that somewhere in the world is a dog named “Mozzarella Cheese” warms my heart. How fun to call that dog’s name!
I admit I skimmed the bio stuff, the books written, what stands out for me is a list of linked blog posts listed under the heading, “What you can expect from this blog”. I could have copy/pasted the text with all the links, but that’s a job for a link-clicking reader. I scanned the list to pick one o read:
I could have picked the Canadian goos one or the cow pasture rock’n roll band, but something about the las link caught my attention, having remembered his opening line of growing up in a small town (for some reason the name of the town did nor register despite the fact if you add an “o” you get the city I live in like 20 years).
As the subtitle goes, the author wrote In response to Phenix Being Named to the 10 Small Towns In Virginia Where You’d Never Want To Live as “A dude who grew up in Phenix, Virginia, responds to a dude who has never been there.”
The writing is razor sharp sarcastic and rings with the joy of taking down some other writer who puts down a place who does not know it as a lived experience.
I smiled and enjoyed the read, and was ready to go back to the task I had gotten distracted from. At the bottom, author Jeffrey Pillow gave attribution for the Creative Commons licensed photo used at the opening of the Welcome to Phenix town sign.
My draw dropped.
The attribution was to me, that was my own photo that I did not even recognize!
From the 2012 date, and also in flickr scanning the photos before and after, this was from the time I was living in Fredericksburg and working with the DTLT team at University of Mary Washington. I had driven a scenic route on the small (blue) highway 40 going eventually to visit my friend and colleague Gardner Campbell, then at Virginia Tech.
Odds Please?
I could have easily missed this link in my scroll of stuff in Mastodon. It was a small chance I clicked. I could have command-w the journey there. But then I click around Jeffrey Pillow’s blog. And when I saw those lists of posts, I could have clicked any of them (it was 1 of 11).
This to me is the small web at its best, when you can find something improbable.
There are no comments on the blog, but I left a message in it’s contact form, thanking the author for finding, using, and attributing my photo (without this I would not even have realized it was mine!).
Time went by.
And then I got an email (as it turns out my message got flagged as spam).
Talk about a small world. Nice to meet you via the world wide web. Not many people on this planet have visited the big town of Phenix, Virginia. I remember years ago when I wrote that post finding your photography on Flickr. You definitely took the scenic drive from Fredericksburg to Blacksburg. But I totally get it: that’s what I do half the time I drive to a new place. I love the little out-of-the-way places you can find that are mere dots on a map.
The original version of that sign, the physical structure, I once had in my bedroom at my parents’ house. The mayor allowed me to take it when the new sign was put up. Your photo is of the newer sign which still stands today as you enter town.
This is just one stop on the small web. Like state highway 40 and the little town of Phenix, you ought to take the offramp from the shiny malls on the super highways, and go for a ride into small web country.
Updates
Mike Grindle, who launched this adventure with his Mastodon post referencing Jeffrey Pillow’s blog, spins his version of the story (a true one, indeed) with his post The Blogosphere Lives!.
To me, it shows what happens when you regularly write, publish, share and hyperlink into the void that is the web: the void speaks back.
https://mikegrindle.com/posts/blogosphere
Featured Image: That time I drove through Phenix and forgot about it, until the small web sent me back. It’s Great to be Back in Phenix flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
