In 2000, Flash websites proliferate, blogging expands, social news sites like Slashdot gain influence — all of this while the dot-com bubble slowly deflates and Napster dominates headlines.

Brown Brothers Media is the biggest media company you've never heard of — powered by AI, fake writers, and plagiarism. When we started asking questions, it started deleting massive amounts of content. The post How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month appeared first on Futurism.

Attached: 1 image PowderLog in 2000 https://web.archive.org/web/20001118143900if_/http://www.extragratis.com:80/powderlog/archive1.html

Attached: 1 image magnetbox in 2003 https://web.archive.org/web/20030424105913if_/http://www.magnetbox.com:80/

Attached: 1 image sci/tech daily in 2000 https://web.archive.org/web/20000619224412if_/http://www.scitechdaily.com:80/

Attached: 1 image Alexa Internet in 2001 https://web.archive.org/web/20011026204846if_/http://www.alexa.com:80/

Flue 2 takes its inspiration from React. Creator Fred Schott, of Astro fame, tells Latent Space why he added hooks and why agents are defined by their harnesses.

AI engineers are rediscovering ontologies as a way to keep probabilistic agents inside deterministic boundaries.

AI systems are consuming false, misleading, and manipulated content from across the internet - and increasingly presenting it as authoritative answers to millions of users.

AI Engineer World’s Fair showed how quickly the AI builder ecosystem is scaling, with San Francisco again feeling like the center of a new web-era boom.

I gave a talk recently for the very excellent Rosenfeld Media “Designing With AI” conference. It was called “New Words for New Work,” and it was my collection of 30 purposefully ridiculous terms to define this ridiculous AI-infused moment. (I workshopped this list on the podcast as well as the newsletter a few months back, so some of these will be familiar if you’re really locked in to the Aboard Cinematic Universe). Here are my top ten: 1. Praygency—A product company mixed with an agency. Everyone is sure this is the future of the industry, but no one knows how it’s supposed to work. That’s why we need the “pray.” Aboard is living through this. 2. IllustrAItor—An illustrator who uses AI image generators. 3. Oftware—Vibe-coded software that changes constantly, with no documentation or even a specific plan. 4. Agentrification—What happens when AI moves into software development. It was a nice neighborhood of engineers, product managers, and designers, but now agents have moved in and are complaining that the deli doesn’t stock craft beer. 5. Promptotype—A simple hacked-together bit of code built with the prompt, often presented as finished software under deadline pressure. 6. Wrapplication—The next state of promptotype: A web app that’s been slathered with chat interfaces in order to show “AI progress.” 7. MVPTSD—What happens when people have to deal with too many promptotypes and wrapplications. 8. Skeumorgue—Where old design systems are sent because they aren’t AI-friendly enough. 9. Reorgasm—The chaos unleashed when CEOs and boards insist on restructuring a company around LLMs. 10. Scalegoats—The teams that get blamed when “just add AI” doesn’t ship and the promised scale doesn’t deliver. # Want more of this? **The Aboard Newsletter from Paul Ford and Rich Ziade:** Weekly insights, emerging trends, and tips on how to navigate the world of AI, software, and your career. Every week, totally free, right in your inbox.

I had a discussion with someone in the industry this week in which the question came up: what makes something web-based in this AI era? Is it just the presence of web technologies? Or does it have to contain the core elements of the web that was created by Tim Berners-Lee in the early 1990s; for example: * It’s an open hypertext system on the internet; * It’s a place where anyone can create a website and publish it; * It has hyperlinks that allow you to jump from site to site; * There are broader discovery mechanisms, like directories and search engines; * The ecosystem has incentives for everyone to participate and that (ideally) rewards created value; * It’s a massive human network of people, where you can easily find your ‘tribe’. In that conversation this week with my fellow agentic web traveller, at first I argued that something is web-based if it contains web technologies. To use a modern example, when a graphical user interface is present in an AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude, typically it uses web technologies like HTML and CSS. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to realize that the web is much more than a set of hypertext technologies. **That the web is fundamentally a human network.** A toot this week from one of my fediverse buddies reinforced this lesson. Elena Rossini was reading Tim Berners-Lee’s recent memoir, _This is For Everyone_ , and came across the mention of my name: Tim Berners-Lee on the read-write web in his memoir; photo by Elena Rossini. “I have always believed the web should be a two-way thing: a place to write, as well as to read,” wrote Sir Tim. Needless to say, I created my ReadWriteWeb blog based on that very philosophy — that the web is for people to fully participate in, rather than a broadcast media system. As my blog ramped up and caught the Web 2.0 wave over 2003-2005, it became a bit of a cliche during this time to say that “the web is made of people.” I’m not sure who first used that phrase during Web 2.0, but Ross Mayfield blogged it in September 2005 — around the same time I made my first trip to Silicon Valley, for the second annual Web 2.0 Conference (I ended up meeting Mayfield on that trip). Web 2.0 is Made of People! (and some of those people had TypePad blogs in 2005) Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, was the first to comment on Mayfield’s post: “Fuck – totally!” Other commenters mostly shared that sentiment, but a couple pointed out that “made out of people” was a quote from the 1973 dystopian movie, Soylent Green. According to IMDB: > [_last lines_] > **Det. Thorn:** Ocean’s dying, plankton’s dying… it’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They’re making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food. You’ve gotta tell them. You’ve gotta tell them! > > **Hatcher:** I promise, Tiger. I promise. I’ll tell the Exchange. > > **Det. Thorn:** You tell everybody. Listen to me, Hatcher. You’ve gotta tell them! Soylent Green is people! We’ve gotta stop them somehow! “Web 2.0 is made of people” was often said in an ironic sense during that era — for example this May 2006 post by me. But twenty years later, I think it does capture something important that is missing from much of the present agentic web discourse (and I include myself in this criticism). The core philosophies of the original web include openness, the two-way aspect of being able to publish as well as consume, hyperlinks, niche networks, and reciprocal incentives. These are all fundamentally human qualities and are crucial to the web’s ongoing survival. ## On AI displacing human web makers In the AI era, I’m especially worried about the incentives of the current tech ecosystem. Are we trying to augment people, as Douglas Engelbart famously aspired to do with hypertext technology, or are we trying to replace people? Of course, I think it should be the former. But that isn’t the prevailing attitude, which is a concern if the web is indeed made of people. As just one example, this week I came across a new website creation product backed by the famous Silicon Valley startup accelerator, Y Combinator. Ploy is an AI product for marketers — the idea is that you can create a marketing website with just a few prompts, instead of paying human web designers to build and maintain a website for you. The tagline: “Your website should be working harder than you are.” On X, its founder was even more explicit, saying that Ploy is an “all-in-one marketing platform that turns your website into your hardest working employee.” Ploy.ai homepage A promotional video from the company drives home the point that Ploy is designed to replace human labour. It shows a young marketer about to leave work for the day, before tapping a few things into her computer, and then leaving the office. We then see some balloon-like AI blobs building a website throughout the night. A night cleaner is the only human present; and he is blissfully oblivious to the AI blobs building a user interface and — for some reason — using the photocopier. The young marketer arrives back at work the following morning to see a fully designed website on her computer, which has even been autonomously emailed to her colleagues and/or clients. AI blobs working hard on that new website. The “hardest-working employee” framing of Ploy treats the website itself as an autonomous worker, rather than as something made and maintained by people. I wonder what the 2006 version of me would’ve thought about that? Probably I’d have wondered how the people-made web can possibly survive if humans are being displaced by machines (although, tbh, I also probably would’ve marvelled at the technology — much like we all admired AJAX and shiny rounded corners back then). Maybe the human web designers displaced by tools like Ploy in 2026 will find other ways to contribute to and benefit from the web ecosystem. I can speak from recent experience and tell you this isn’t an easy transition to make; my online media job was axed back in February, and I’m still trying to find an income. Even if web makers and creators adapt, chances are we’ll end up with a lot more generically bland marketing websites as a result of AI design tools like Ploy. Yes, AI can produce websites, just as ChatGPT or Google’s AI Mode can produce answers to your questions (obviating the need for you to click on and read online media publications). But I’d argue it fundamentally weakens the social and creative aspects — the _human_ aspects — of the web platform. ## So what is the web now? To return to the question of what “web-based” actually means in 2026. From a purely technical perspective, I don’t think there’s a big danger that web technologies will disappear: Ploy produces HTML and CSS websites (most likely with an unhealthy amount of JavaScript), and AI systems like ChatGPT and Claude will use those same technologies to layer in graphic interfaces. But I’ve come to realize that’s just one part of what the web ecosystem is. What makes the web special is the input from people: how we shape our identities online, how we create and maintain communities, how many of us make a living (or at least try to), how the web enables us to exchange human knowledge, and how it helps us build relationships with other people. What’s more, the openness of the web is what makes it all work: we can build interoperable sites and link to each other, we don’t need any corporation’s permission to publish, and we can access all voices through open protocols like RSS and ActivityPub. So yes, the web is made of people! And I for one pledge to keep that top of my mind while building my latest blog: Agentic Web News. _Lead image: from the “Soylent Green is people!” scene;via YouTube_

I had a discussion with someone in the industry this week in which the question came up: what makes something web-based in this AI era? Is it just the presence of web technologies? Or does it have to contain the core elements of the web that was created by Tim Berners-Lee in the early 1990s; for example: * It’s an open hypertext system on the internet; * It’s a place where anyone can create a website and publish it; * It has hyperlinks that allow you to jump from site to site; * There are broader discovery mechanisms, like directories and search engines; * The ecosystem has incentives for everyone to participate and that (ideally) rewards created value; * It’s a massive human network of people, where you can easily find your ‘tribe’. In that conversation this week with my fellow agentic web traveller, at first I argued that something is web-based if it contains web technologies. To use a modern example, when a user interface is present in an AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude, typically it uses web technologies like HTML and CSS. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to realize that the web is much more than a set of hypertext technologies. **That the web is fundamentally a human network.** A toot this week from one of my fediverse buddies reinforced this lesson. Elena Rossini was reading Tim Berners-Lee’s recent memoir, _This is For Everyone_ , and came across the mention of my name: Tim Berners-Lee on the read-write web in his memoir; photo by Elena Rossini. “I have always believed the web should be a two-way thing: a place to write, as well as to read,” wrote Sir Tim. Needless to say, I created my ReadWriteWeb blog based on that very philosophy — that the web is for people to fully participate in, rather than a broadcast media system. As my blog ramped up and caught the Web 2.0 wave over 2003-2005, it became a bit of a cliche during this time to say that “the web is made of people.” I’m not sure who first used that phrase during Web 2.0, but Ross Mayfield blogged it in September 2005 — around the same time I made my first trip to Silicon Valley, for the second annual Web 2.0 Conference (I ended up meeting Mayfield on that trip). Web 2.0 is Made of People! (and some of those people had TypePad blogs in 2005) Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, was the first to comment on Mayfield’s post: “Fuck – totally!” Other commenters mostly shared that sentiment, but a couple pointed out that “made out of people” was a quote from the 1973 dystopian movie, Soylent Green. According to IMDB: > [_last lines_] > **Det. Thorn:** Ocean’s dying, plankton’s dying… it’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They’re making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food. You’ve gotta tell them. You’ve gotta tell them! > > **Hatcher:** I promise, Tiger. I promise. I’ll tell the Exchange. > > **Det. Thorn:** You tell everybody. Listen to me, Hatcher. You’ve gotta tell them! Soylent Green is people! We’ve gotta stop them somehow! “Web 2.0 is made of people” was often said in an ironic sense during that era — for example this May 2006 post by me. But twenty years later, I think it does capture something important that is missing from much of the present agentic web discourse (and I include myself in this criticism). The core philosophies of the original web include openness, the two-way aspect of being able to publish as well as consume, hyperlinks, niche networks, and reciprocal incentives. These are all fundamentally human qualities and are crucial to the web’s ongoing survival. ## On AI displacing human web makers In the AI era, I’m especially worried about the incentives of the current tech ecosystem. Are we trying to augment people, as Douglas Engelbart famously aspired to do with hypertext technology, or are we trying to replace people? Of course, I think it should be the former. But that isn’t the prevailing attitude, which is a concern if the web is indeed made of people. As just one example, this week I came across a new website creation product backed by the famous Silicon Valley startup accelerator, Y Combinator. Ploy is an AI product for marketers — the idea is that you can create a marketing website with just a few prompts, instead of paying human web designers to build and maintain a website for you. The tagline: “Your website should be working harder than you are.” On X, its founder was even more explicit, saying that Ploy is an “all-in-one marketing platform that turns your website into your hardest working employee.” Ploy.ai homepage A promotional video from the company drives home the point that Ploy is designed to replace human labour. It shows a young marketer about to leave work for the day, before tapping a few things into her computer, and then leaving the office. We then see some balloon-like AI blobs building a website throughout the night. A night cleaner is the only human present; and he is blissfully oblivious to the AI blobs building a user interface and — for some reason — using the photocopier. The young marketer arrives back at work the following morning to see a fully designed website on her computer, which has even been autonomously emailed to her colleagues and/or clients. AI blobs working hard on that new website. The “hardest-working employee” framing of Ploy treats the website itself as an autonomous worker, rather than as something made and maintained by people. I wonder what the 2006 version of me would’ve thought about that? Probably I’d have wondered how the people-made web can possibly survive if humans are being displaced by machines (although, tbh, I also probably would’ve marvelled at the technology — much like we all admired AJAX and shiny rounded corners back then). Maybe the human web designers displaced by tools like Ploy in 2026 will find other ways to contribute to and benefit from the web ecosystem. I can speak from recent experience and tell you this isn’t an easy transition to make; my online media job was axed back in February, and I’m still trying to find an income. Even if web makers and creators adapt, chances are we’ll end up with a lot more generically bland marketing websites as a result of AI design tools like Ploy. Yes, AI can produce websites, just as ChatGPT or Google’s AI Mode can produce answers to your questions (obviating the need for you to click on and read online media publications). But I’d argue it fundamentally weakens the social and creative aspects — the _human_ aspects — of the web platform. ## So what is the web now? To return to the question of what “web-based” actually means in 2026. From a purely technical perspective, I don’t think there’s a big danger that web technologies will disappear: Ploy produces HTML and CSS websites (most likely with an unhealthy amount of JavaScript), and AI systems like ChatGPT and Claude will use those same technologies to layer in graphic interfaces. But I’ve come to realize that’s just one part of what the web ecosystem is. What makes the web special is the input from people: how we shape our identities online, how we create and maintain communities, how many of us make a living (or at least try to), how the web enables us to exchange human knowledge, and how it helps us build relationships with other people. What’s more, the openness of the web is what makes it all work: we can build interoperable sites and link to each other, we don’t need any corporation’s permission to publish, and we can access all voices through open protocols like RSS and ActivityPub. So yes, the web is made of people! And I for one pledge to keep that top of my mind while building my latest blog: Agentic Web News. _Lead image: from the “Soylent Green is people!” scene;via YouTube_

This week, my Agentic Web News posts circled around one question: what happens when the web stops being organized only around pages, and starts being organized around machine-readable capabilities, agent interfaces and brand systems? I’ve been writing for a while now about the shift from a web of pages to a web of capabilities. But to me, that has never meant that the human web is going away. Clearly I don’t think that, otherwise I wouldn’t have started a new tech blog. Rather, the point is that there’s an extra layer of the web emerging — one built for our machine helpers. This week, that extra layer began to look less abstract. ## From busy bots to atomic brand kits In my weekly market signals post, I argued that the machine-readable web is becoming a business problem. Cloudflare’s bot traffic data — stating that bots have now passed human traffic for the first time — was the most obvious signal: websites are facing a large and growing machine demand. And if there’s demand, then a viable market will undoubtedly form too. The old web monetized human attention — first with banner ads, then with targeted advertising based on user profiling and social activity. But the agentic web won’t be about attention in quite the same way. It will have to find a way to monetize access, permission, attribution and action. All of which is still in the wild west stage. One of the more intriguing concepts I came across this week was the “atomic brand kit,” as outlined by Emmett Shine from the New York digital studio, Little Plains. It’s a deceptively simple idea: if your website is becoming machine-readable, shouldn’t your brand do that too? Little Plains has started to deliver brand systems to their clients with two folders: `/human` and `/agent`. The human side contains the familiar assets — logos, guidelines, visual identity. But the agent side encodes the brand as instructions using YAML, JSON, Markdown, HTML, CSS and SVG files. In other words, a brand becomes something closer to a software program that agents can run: a structured, machine-readable understanding of what the brand is, who it’s for, how it sounds and how it looks. That matters because agents will not always interact with a company through the canonical homepage, or even through a traditional app. They may generate brand-consistent pages, interfaces and content across contexts the brand does not fully control. This week’s market signals also covered Salesforce’s agreement to acquire Contentful, a so-called “headless CMS” company. In the early 2020s, headless CMS systems were mainly framed as a way to decouple the frontend from the backend. Fast forward to 2026, and AI systems are less dependent on the traditional “head” of a CMS — they primarily want the backend data. So Salesforce buying a headless CMS makes sense if Agentforce needs to dynamically assemble and deliver personalized experiences across channels. ## MCP Apps and the rise of agentic apps That brings me to my second AWN post this week, an interview with MCP Apps co-creators Ido Salomon and Liad Yosef. MCP Apps began as MCP-UI, an open source project that provided a way to add web-based user interface components to AI agents. The goal from the start was “UI over MCP”: letting an MCP server return a UI resource, usually HTML, which the host renders inline in the conversation, with interactions passed back through the host. What interests me most is that MCP Apps is not just a developer convenience. As Salomon put it, this is “a new way to distribute applications.” But as both Salomon and Yosef pointed out, discovery, ranking and monetization are still open questions in this new agentic apps paradigm. The capability may exist, and MCP Apps may be available inside chatbots, but that does not mean users know when or how to invoke them. The more I think about this, the more I see MCP Apps, atomic brand kits, and headless CMS infrastructure as parts of the same larger shift. Apps, brands and content systems are all being decomposed into machine-readable components that agents can understand, assemble and present back to users. ## From UI chunks to generative UI In the MCP Apps post, I used the metaphor of “UI chunks.” A user of ChatGPT, Claude or another AI system will often need only a small part of a host app or website, depending on the context. If MCP Apps works as intended, developers will not only build websites, mobile apps, desktop apps or SaaS dashboards. They will also build app fragments that run inside AI assistants. Those fragments will be interactive, contextual and portable across different AI systems. The next step may be generative UI: interfaces generated on the fly for a particular query or task. Google is already talking about this for Search, and Claude’s freeform Imagine feature points in a similar direction. Yosef’s framing was useful here: MCP Apps may provide a unified UI standard across hosts, but the next goal is a broader umbrella standard across methods of UI generation. ## The strategic question for orgs So my field note this week is this: the agentic web’s interface layer is starting to come into focus. It will not be just websites plus APIs (or MCP!). It will involve app fragments, generated interfaces, brand systems that agents can interpret, and content backends that can feed personalized agent-mediated experiences. The strategic question for companies is no longer just whether you have a website or an API, but whether your product, content and brand can show up as a useful, trusted interface inside an agent’s workflow. That is still early, messy and unresolved. But it’s no longer theoretical.

A printable micro-zine about why and how to make your own website or blog.

It's 1998, you make a website in the copy of frontpage express that came with your computer, it's just like Word and it's very easy, you figure out how to upload it to the couple megs of web space that your ISP gives you (the instructions are on their website), you visit your site in your browser and everything's fine and the site's readable and everything looks the way it should 🦝 "Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026" you think to yourself for some reason

Attached: 1 image You must remember this. It’s early-2000s zeldman.com. Enjoy a look back at 31 years of site design evolution. https://zeldman.com/2026/06/04/remembrance-of-zeldman-coms-past/ #design #blogs #blogging #indieweb #personalsites

VoidZero is excited to announce that we are joining Cloudflare. Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+ will remain open-source and MIT-licensed. Evan and the rest of the VoidZero team will continue to lead these projects, with Cloudflare fully committed to supporting our mission.