Month: February 2024

YAHOO NOISE

The directories on Yahoo used to be edited by people, and as you can see from the image above (which I snagged from the Wayback Machine), it went deep.

The Yahoo Directory closed in 2014.

I’m inclined to write “imagine if we had something like this now?” But, anyone could build something like this for their local scene, for their state, their region.

And no one needs to make the BIG ONE, the supreme list of whatever. Everyone could have their lists of favorite bands, or art supply stores, or camera shops, whatever.

There are giant directories that exist like this today, I know. But they’re all flooded with SEO nonsense, scraped, void of humanity.

I think, if anything, we need to get back to human-curated directories and inspire everyone to make their own… de-centralized, as it were. This way there’s not one thing to rule them all, everyone just finds their favorites.

THE OLD MUSIC WEB

We need to get back to this.

The site is still active, and some of the links still work, but wow, remember when local scenes used to have websites like this?

I also found this page called Escape. There are lots of broken links, but it is still a reminder of what old websites used to look like.

I love how innocent and pure this bit of text is:

“An amazing unofficial Mudhoney page. It has everything about them, their side projects, and other sordid details.”

Like, there was a time when you couldn’t read every interview a band ever did online, or see all the photos they posted on Instagram.

Makes me think I should start an un-official band page or two!

We are the creative professionals who base our entire careers on making things look interesting.

Why would we stop with our branding, our collateral material, and – for the love of God – our website?

We are in the world of visual excellence. We should make visual excellence the priority feature of our brand.

Don Giannatti