Here is the subtitle for this project known as the Internet Phone Book: a directory for exploring the vast poetic web.
The Poetic Web is a phrase I have stumbled on now and then, and I can’t remember now when or where I stumbled on the Internet Phone Book project, but I sure am glad I did. It’s a physical book made for exploring hundreds (actually, 737) of websites that off the regular paths — no social media platforms, no giant corporations. Just regular people making websites as passion projects, and maybe even mostly for an audience of one (themselves). The Poetic Web, in my mind, indicates personality of websites in their quirky coding, wording, artwork and more.
A more formal definition: “The Poetic Web is a practice and process towards a place: a web that is more handmade, expressive, and intimate; where site-making is a political, personal, and poetic act. This is a growing collection of projects, tools, and teachings around it.” — via The Poetic Web (Chia Amisola)
I’ve begun exploring more of the sites found in the Internet Phone Book itself more thoroughly in the new year (I wrote about this in a post the other day). I’ve highlighted about 50 sites that I want to explore, and have done a little touring already of some others and found it quite fun to see what people are up to or have been up to. The sites inside the book were either sent in my website owners or recommended to the editors.
The collection of sites here is curated and edited by Kristoffer Tjalve and Elliott Cost, and both add essays about the Indie Web/ Poetic Web to the collection, along with a handful of other quite interesting essays that explore how our online homes represent who we are, as identify markers, and reminders of all the magical possibilities that still exist for us, if we can just break free from the silos that the huge corporations have built for us, to make money off our data and our privacy.
From the introduction: “The web is called the web because it is a network of hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of sites. To keep the web alive requires the active participation and care of people like you.” — Kristoffer Tjalve
Just look at some of the titles of the essays, and tell me you are not intrigued:
- From My To Me (Olia Lialina)
- Domain Naming (Chia Amisola)
- A View Source Web (Garry Ing)
- My Website Is A Shifting House Next To A River Of Knowledge. What Could Yours Be? (Laurel Schwultst)
- Coding In Situ (Benjamin Earl)
- Exploring The Vastness Of A Website(Elliott Cost)
Disclosure: I am writing this review but the book is no longer available. It was an independent endeavor, and they raised money from readers like me before publishing the book, and it seems as if they were able to successfully fund the project and now the books are gone. Sorry. (On a positive note, though, the cover also says: Issue One, 2025 — indicating the project might have future iterations).
Peace (calling it up),
Kevin