"How the Blog Broke the Web"

"In ‘94, a college student named Justin Hall broke free from the table of contents format. He added to the top of his homepage daily, and he headlined each section with the date. He shared everything: from interesting links he found to his experiments with sex and drugs.

Justin’s Links became the first daily web diary.

That’s what they were called then… web diaries. (The name weblogcame a few years later, as some of their writers moved away from extremely personal topics.)...

When jjg compiled his list of “web logs” in early 1999, there were only 23. That’s not a typo: Twenty-three, twenty-three web logs on the internet, ah ah ah. No doubt he missed many — and a bunch had lived and died by then, including mine — but by what kind of multiplier? Five? Ten times? So there were what, maybe 230 web logs?...

Homepages had a timeless quality, an index of interesting or useful or relevant things about a topic or about a person. You didn’t reload a homepage every day in pursuit of novelty. (That’s what Netscape’s What’s Cool was for!)

Chronological content was in the minority."

https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/

I fully miss homepages. 

I miss the old weird internet where you went to a site because your friend told you about it and spelled it for you, and you looked through every section and peeked into someone's mind that way. Found weird quizzes and puzzles and flash games and stories. 

but when I really think about it, I don't actually want to go back. I think I just wish that that internet still existed for someone, for some 12-year-old waiting to be picked up from school, exploring secret silly worlds in the library with their friends

FB: "the damn reverse chronology bias — once called into creation, it hungers eternally — sought its next victim. Myspace. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Pinterest, of all things. Today these social publishing tools are beginning to buck reverse chronological sort; they’re introducing algorithm sort, to surface content not by time posted but by popularity, or expected interactions, based on individual and group history. There is even less control than ever before.

There are no more quirky homepages."

"Our Attitude Toward Aliens Proves We Still Think We’re Special"

"The strong Fermi’s paradox became even stronger, so to speak, in 2001, with the work of Charles Lineweaver and collaborators on the age distribution of terrestrial planets in the Milky Way. His calculations show that Earth-like planets in our galaxy began forming more than 9 billion years ago, and that their median age is 6.4 ± 0.9 billion years, which is significantly greater than the age of the Earth and the solar system. This means that a large majority of habitable planets are much older than Earth. If we believe that humans and the planet we live on are not particularly special compared to other civilizations on other planets, we would conclude that the stage of the biosphere and technology on other occupied planets must be, on average, older than the corresponding stages we see on Earth. If we humans are now on the cusp of colonizing our solar system, and we are not much faster than other civilizations, those civilizations should have completed this colonization long ago and spread to other parts of the galaxy... 

Many of us choose to ignore Fermi’s paradox, or even fight it, because it requires too complete an acceptance of our cosmic mediocrity. We would rather secretly believe we are special than confront the real consequences of the paradox—consequences like, for example, intelligence being a maladaptive trait, or our universe being a simulation, or us living in a cosmic zoo. "

http://m.nautil.us/issue/63/horizons/our-attitude-toward-aliens-proves-we-still-think-were-special

Related: Other one on imagining aliens

FB: "Now that we know that the Earth is a latecomer, and believe the foundations of life have the power to take hold quickly, Fermi’s paradox is more puzzling than ever. In the evocative words of physicist Adrian Kent: It’s just too damn quiet in the local universe."