~ Early Web Links ~

Arts & Letters Daily has been curating links to the best articles, book reviews, and essays on philosophy, literature, history, and culture since 1998, amassing a remarkable archive of over 17,000 pieces. Run by editors connected to The Chronicle of Higher Education, it serves as an essential daily digest for intellectuals and anyone who loves serious ideas and criticism.

A low-bandwidth podcast archive hosting daily episodes of TOSOM (The Other Side of Midnight), optimized for listeners with limited data caps. The site provides a practical alternative feed so fans can consume roughly 20 episodes per month using only a fraction of a typical 10GB bandwidth allowance.

Consumer World is a long-running consumer advocacy hub curating breaking consumer news, shopping bargains, scam warnings, and price comparison tools all in one place. Founded in 1995, it covers everything from shrinkflation and fake product alerts to mortgage rates and prescription drug discounts, making it a go-to resource for savvy shoppers and consumer rights advocates.

Brent Simmons, creator of NetNewsWire, writes thoughtfully about the collapse of Twitter's dominance as the internet's de facto town square and what it means for the open web. The post argues passionately for a return to the decentralized, creative energy of the early web and the RSS-driven blogosphere.

Slower News is a human-curated digest tracking technology's effects on geopolitics, politics, economy, society, ecology, and more, deliberately filtered to surface relevant trends and edge cases without the noise of mainstream news cycles. Hand-coded, JavaScript-free, and tracking-free, it offers a thoughtfully minimal reading experience organized around broad themes like AI, de-dollarization, demographic shifts, and free speech.

Ronan Jouchet's 'blag' features weekly roundups of curated links spanning music discoveries, tech commentary, geopolitics, and cultural oddities from his life in Montreal. Each post is a personal digest mixing Bandcamp embeds, Kottke finds, and bilingual (French/English) reads that reflect a curious, wide-ranging mind.

Aardvark Daily is New Zealand's longest-running online daily news and commentary publication, now in its 30th year, run by Bruce Simpson covering science, technology, and current events with a distinctly Kiwi perspective. Visitors will find opinionated columns on topics ranging from energy policy and fuel scams to computing history, making it a veteran voice in independent tech journalism.

Unfogged is a long-running group blog with multiple contributors including Ogged, Fontana Labs, Heebie-Geebie, and others, covering politics, current events, and everyday musings in a lively community format. Posts touch on topics from hurricane damage to Trump administration policy, and the active comment sections often run into the dozens, making the discussion as valuable as the posts themselves.

Worldbridges.net is a network of online communities built around homegrown webcasting and new media technologies, connecting educators and learners across projects like EdTechTalk, WebcastAcademy, and WebheadsInAction. The site serves as a hub for live and recorded webcasts, collaborative learning events, and a calendar of participatory broadcasts aimed at global education and communication.

OnlyTheGood.org is an experimental art-tech project by Donnachie, Simionato & son and Antonio Riello that automatically classifies news headlines from major services like Google News and Reuters as emotionally positive or negative, then plots the results in real-time graphs. The project blurs the line between digital art installation and media criticism, and was exhibited at a solo show in Stuttgart, Germany, with RSS feeds and a portable graph widget offered for public use.