This was a period where web site discovery services like Stumbleupon were all the rage. It was like spinning the Wheel of Fortune anticipating where you'd land. It was fun! Then poof. It disappeared.
What’s missing from the calls for an old web is navigation.
Discoverability requires a crawler, a directory, a hot ranking, or randomization.
What is needed is some kind of hybrid wiki/directory that is more than “page of links to good travel blogs.” It needs to be a database that can be navigated with filters and categories. Filter by travel, filter by country. Filter by food, filter by cuisine, filter by reviews or recipes. It needs both hierarchy and dynamicness, but it also can’t be an open ended search or chat that has no inherent navigation. I want to be able to see what exists before searching, and search should be a tool to refine and pare the results.
I made Flash games back then and had a personal website I kept them all on. I got a huge burst of traffic thanks to someone adding my site to StumbleUpon (my webhost had analytics and would show me referral links). Ran out of bandwidth several months because of it.
Most of them are only on here[1] now, or in one of the Flash game archives. I should figure some way to get them up and playable elsewhere again. Been debating getting an itch.io page going or something.
Discoverability requires a crawler, a directory, a hot ranking, or randomization.
What is needed is some kind of hybrid wiki/directory that is more than “page of links to good travel blogs.” It needs to be a database that can be navigated with filters and categories. Filter by travel, filter by country. Filter by food, filter by cuisine, filter by reviews or recipes. It needs both hierarchy and dynamicness, but it also can’t be an open ended search or chat that has no inherent navigation. I want to be able to see what exists before searching, and search should be a tool to refine and pare the results.