As someone who has written a lot about the independent web in the past, then something like the newly-launched Pixel Area is like catnip to me.
From the site’s About page1, Oleh Providnyk explains:
“Pixel Area is a 100×100 coordinate grid with room for 10,000 websites. Each pixel belongs to a real person and links to whatever they have online: a blog, a project, or just a small site they made. You pick an empty spot, choose a color, add a short description, and visitors find you by wandering around the map, one coordinate at a time, without really knowing where they will end up. […]
Behind every pixel there is a person who wanted to have their own place on the web. Someone keeping a blog, a photo journal, or notes about their garden that maybe three people read – and they keep doing it anyway. That’s the part I care about: there is a person behind every square, with their own interests, ideas and way of doing things.”
It’s a concept which is best experienced rather than read about. Click or tap around, or hit “random space”, and discover loads of sites which you might otherwise never come across.
In some ways, Pixel Area is no different to a normal list of sites that you may enjoy, as per the early days of the web, and currently best-represented by the brilliant ooh.directory. But I’m a sucker for someone trying to find a genuinely new way of guiding people towards interesting stuff. (I hope the limited hashtags will be expanded on at some point, which will become more important as more sites join.)
And yes, I have claimed my own pixel for Dirty Feed. The coordinates? X: 20, Y: 10. Or… 2010, the year this site launched. I shall be smug about this for the rest of the month, yes.
It remains bizarre to me how many websites either don’t have an About page, or make it a nightmare to find. It’s one of the first places I click on when I visit a new site; I need to get the lie of the land in order to interpret what I’m reading. More than once, I’ve resorted to reading a site’s bio on their social media feed as I couldn’t find an obvious link to a page which told me what the damn site actually is, which is faintly ludicrous. ↩