iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

The state of the web in 2026. Saw this on LinkedIn and it does, unfortunately, sum up Google search right now.

A cartoon outside a neon-lit “Google Search” nightclub shows a guard turning away a sad “Small Legit Website” while smiling spam sites walk down a red carpet marked “Spam Sites This Way.”

Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/07/2026

Simon Reynolds, one of my favourite authors, on blogging in the 2000s. He still blogs to this day, unusually running multiple Blogspot sites, one for each book and/or genre he writes about. I subscribe to all of them in my Feedbin / NetNewsWire setup, and dip […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

AFTERWORD / AFTERWARDS
represented a riposte to Oasis at Knebworth: a convocation of future-facing people blithely indifferent to Britpop.
Having said that, the internet did birth something that gave me a thrilling second taste of the same synergy between writers, and between writers and readers, that had fuelled the heyday of the print-and-paper weeklies. I'm talking about the blog scene of the 2000s. Here, it seemed to me, was the music press in exile, magically reconstituted online. Arguments raged, enthusiasms roiled, pretentiousness reigned supreme. As a blogger you were free to play games with structure and tone even more so than in the old-school weeklies. You could connect music to politics, philosophy, and all the other arts. You could wax theoretical or deeply personal. And the pace was even faster than the weekly rhythm of the music papers: with no intermediary editors, you responded to other bloggers' provocations in almost real-time, as I did with Mark Fisher's now legendary K-Punk blog among many others. Only downside: no pay, not even the measly word-rates offered by the inkies. So like a born-again fanzine writer, I blogged just for the pure love of it. And I still do, even though most of my first-wave contemporaries from the 2000s have moved on to other things.

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/05/2026

Now they’ve discovered external style sheets.

Screenshot of X discussion about linking to a CSS file so the LLM company doesn’t charge you more money for rendering HTML

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/05/2026

1/x On Friday, I ran a personal poll asking whether you are open to seeing AI content from me in your feeds. The results pleasantly surprised me, and a couple of commenters also gave me a path forward here. Firstly, re the results. Not a large sample size […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

The question: are you interested in Al-related posts from me? (in addition to my typical open web fare)

Yes (I too use Al) 38%
Yes (but I'm anti-Al) 19%
If you must 22%
No, go post on X! 20%
103 votes

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/03/2026

Thanks to @jaz and the @teamtoot team, I’ve upped my laptop sticker game (the other stickers were courtesy of @andypiper a while ago). #TootWales

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/02/2026

@jaz opening the #TootWales event this evening in Cardiff, at the scenic Glamorgan Cricket Club.

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/01/2026

This book spoke to me today at my local indie bookstore. No idea why… #AIculturalstagnation

Photo of a book:
JAMES FOX
CRAFT LAND
A Journey Through Britain's Lost Arts & Vanishing Trades

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/01/2026

Visiting Bristol on a day off is like catching up with your heavily tattooed friend.

Graffiti of a wolf(?) on a Bristol building, near Rough Trade record shop

Some kind of phoenix / dragon; graffiti on building near Rough Trade

Graffitied walls in Castle Park, Bristol

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/01/2026

My employer, The New Stack, has just moved from Title Case to Sentence Case in its headlines (i.e. lower-case instead of capitalizing). I hadn't really noticed before, but most of the tech news sites in our orbit do the same — The Verge, TechCrunch, et al. It […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Example of Sentence Case on The New Stack

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/01/2026

Had a day off today and went to Hay-on-Wye (the UK’s book town) with my daughter. I managed to find a 2006 web design book, packed with screenshots. Anyone else a fan of the “Web Design Index by Content” books? #WebDesignHistory

Web Design Index by Content.02 book cover

Web Design Index by Content0.2, showing screenshot images inside the book

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/01/2026

Just checked my Google search traffic stats, and boy this is becoming grim for web publishers: Clicks Per Impression for Cybercultural is down to an all-time low of 0.37 (was as high as 2.24 in mid-2024). BUT search impressions is at an all-time high, and […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Chart showing impressions per month from Google search

Chart showing clicks per month from Google search

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/01/2026

Red robin just minding his own business on a chilly winter day. #ukbirds

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/01/2026

Back at work, but I had a nice one-week break over xmas. I always enjoy catching up on reading during time offs, and one of the books I read this time was an excellent biographical portrait about Muriel Spark. She was obsessed with Mary Shelley and […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Photo of Frances Wilson’s book “Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark”

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/12/2025

Christmas reading. That mix of literature and science that Richard Holmes does so well. Also, giving me a new appreciation of Tennyson (who I didn’t study back in my english lit uni days).

Richard Holmes’ latest book, The Boundless Deep

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/12/2025

I made a few tweaks to my web design this week; one was to make the rww-red header band of Cybercultural a bit taller. I was partly inspired by a recent @classicweb post: seeing a 2003 Kottke design made me think, hmm, that lemon-yellow header of his is […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Cybercultural in 2025 screenshot, compared to Kottke.org in 2003; it shows the header bands are the same height.

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/12/2025

This guy arrived at Cybercultural HQ this morning. His home will soon be on my Zoom background bookshelf :) #Plushtodon

Newly arrived plushtodon posing in front of my Cybercultural website.

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/12/2025

BirdBuddy Wrapped. The blue tits are the Bowie of my bird feeder.

Eurasian
Blue
Tit
418 visits
House
Sparrow
194 visits
Great
Tit
72 visits

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/11/2025

Your moment of Saturday zen: a red-breasted robin drops by during a rare break from blue tits and sparrows mobbing the bird feeder (let’s not talk about when the starlings come in, brawling and bullying). Full disclosure: this photo, snapped through the […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Red-breasted robin during a moment of peace at the bird feeder.

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/11/2025

The Wayback Machine has been offline for the past hour or so :( Every morning before I work I am either writing Cybercultural posts or researching them, so Wayback is a daily visit for me. Hope they aren't having tech issues. No word yet on their socials (cc @internetarchive)

Wayback Machine "temporarily offline" message

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/11/2025

One of the more obnoxious trends in recent years is how VC firms have tried to brand themselves as “media” — a trend that Musk’s X amplified. I’m old enough to remember when bloggers became “new media” in the 2000s; & sure, some of us did indeed turn into […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Text from LinkedIn post about A16Z New Media:

“Every company needs to be a media company first nowadays.
Here's my hot take: We're moving toward VCs funding media startups that then expand into products, rather than starting with products and trying to build content + communities around them.
Think about it, creators have been doing this forever. Build the audience first, then figure out what to sell them based on what the audience asks for.
The future of venture capital might be:
1. Investing in a large number of early stage media companies.
2. Seeing which ones can gain traction & grow communities quickly.
3. Let that community dictate what products or services emerge.
4. Double down on winners, cut the losers.
This news isn't just al6z evolving their offering. They're showing us the future of how businesses get built.
#venturecapital #startups #distribution
AlEL
NEW MEDIA
393
70 comments • 32 reposts”

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/11/2025

So, any update on Threads allowing its users to follow Mastodon users? It’s nearly a year after it announced partial support for that, but in my tests just now it doesn’t appear that even partial support works now. Have they just sweeped this entirely under […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Threads pretending to be part of the fediverse in December 2024

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/10/2025

I know people will be piling on about Grokipedia, but hilariously its definition of Web 2.0 seems to be much better than Wikipedia's. On Grokipedia's page, there's a great description of misinformation on platforms like X and Facebook. Wikipedia does not […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

highlighted: "This propagation is amplified by engagement-maximizing algorithms on platforms like Facebook and Twitter (now X), which surface content correlating with past user behavior, thereby favoring sensational falsehoods that elicit reactions over mundane facts. For instance, a 2024 observational study of Twitter's For You feed revealed disproportionate amplification of low-credibility accounts, with algorithms boosting their visibility by up to 2.5 times compared to chronological timelines, enabling sustained reach for debunked narratives."

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/10/2025

They say AI hallucinates and gets things wrong. But what about humans!? Twice today I've seen the NANDA report referenced — in a Wired profile of AI critic/AI publicist Ed Zitron, and in a Gary Marcus op-ed on NYT. As I noted in my recent profile of NANDA […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/10/2025

Regarding @anildash's excellent post about OpenAI's Atlas browser (www.anildash.com/2025/10/22/atlas-a…). I tested how visible my history website Cybercultural is in Atlas vs Chrome with the search query: "what happened on the internet […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

My query result in Chrome; my site is above the fold (just) in my MacBook.

My query result in Atlas; my site does get mentioned, although the ChatGPT results overshadow it.

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/10/2025

I'm currently writing the next in my Cybercultural series of posts about early blogging, now focusing on 2001 (here's 2000: cybercultural.com/p/blogs-rss-2000). I came across #!/usr/bin/girl by @zannah, who had multiple websites back then. Such great […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/10/2025

First test of Atlas — its summary of my latest article is almost as long as the article 😂

OpenAI Atlas displaying my latest Cybercultural article and "summarizing" it

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/10/2025

Also, I tried my hand at a WTN-related meme.

Murderbot: "These humans still don't know what the fediverse is..."

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2025

@timbl near the end of his wonderful memoir: “The evolution of the Fediverse is hard to predict - there are parts of it that we can't imagine […] The system will emerge organically, and I can't predict what other wonderful things will be built on top of it […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

The evolution of the Fediverse is hard to predict - there are parts of it that we can't imagine, just as, in the days of the early web, I could never have imagined something like Google search - or Github, or a webcomic like KCD. The system will emerge organ-ically, and I can't predict what other wonderful things will be built on top of it. With Solid, with Al, with Bluesky, Matrix and Mastodon, with RSS and a podcasting revival, I see these little shoots breaking forth from the soil - the first signs of spring. I think users are ready for something else.

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2025

5/ Douglas Rushkoff made a great point in this podcast episode: that social media nowadays, and internet culture in general, mirrors the zeros and ones nature of binary computing. Everything is either True or False in 2025, and there is nothing in-between […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Hidden Forces podcast episode with Doug Rushkoff

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/09/2025

For my 'one more thing' on WTN this week ( @feed ) I highlighted some lovely web community action from 2000. The image attached is from Anita Rowland's weblog that year, describing a meetup with fellow Seattle bloggers (2 legendary bloggers, @jessamyn and […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Anita Rowland's weblog in February 2000, describing a meetup with fellow Seattle bloggers

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2025

TBL on the founding of WHATWG, which now controls the HTML standard (clearly he was not a fan, at least initially).

From TBL memoir, pg 196:

continued developing their flavour of HT ML beyond W3C's control.
There was a real toxicity to the WHATWG mailing list; they were a bunch of typically white male geeks who had hoisted the pirate's black flag, and they were not very polite about disagreement.
WHATWG's approach allowed web developers to make all kinds of errors, and never complained to anyone reading the page by raising alert boxes or banners. Now, because the errors in the web page are hidden from the user, they are also hidden from the developer, who can never see what needs to be done to clear up the messy bits. Under this approach, the web would become bloated and slow, full of errors which the browser was programmed to ignore.
Hixie soon left W3C completely, and not long after, someone found a series of blog posts he had previously written advocating for what he called 'humanitarian eugenics'. Hixie's callow manifesto called for selective reproduction based on measures of intelligence, where mothers cannot bear offspring without a licence. As you can

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/09/2025

OMG, I just discovered I got a mention in Tim Berners-Lee’s memoir!! Totally unexpected. Ok, he spelled my name wrong, but that doesn’t matter :) The read-write web lives on!

Despite the lull in development of the semantic web of the 1990s, by the late 2000s, I was beginning to see a way forward. I have always believed the web should be a two-way thing: a place to write, as well as to read. Richard McManus, a journalist and blogger, captured this spirit in a blog he named the 'read-write web'. It was also a big value with the W3C team: my original WorldWide Web.app on the NeXT had been an editor, not simply a browser: an application, like a word processor, which allows you to create and modify material as well as just read it. At INRIA, the French national computer science lab, Vincent Quint and Irene Greif had built a hypertext browser-editor, where you could even edit diagrams. The W3C website was set up so that you could submit your own web page. And of course, Wikipedia is a great realization of this idea.
So for documents, we can set up a read-write web.

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/09/2025

Well I got an invite to the new Digg, so am checking it out now. I don't even use Reddit much, so I can't see myself using new Digg. The one social news site I do check regularly is Hacker News. But if you scan new Digg's homepage, it's clear the community […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/09/2025

Ah ha, so if Signal ever goes evil, then we have a solution: "...we also have a two-pack bundle. The idea being, you can exchange encrypted messages with a friend, relatively safely." discuss.systems/@ricci/115180528280…

two computers with Enigma Touches communicating with each other

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/09/2025

If you search for “fediverse” on Threads, it’s mostly confused users wondering why they are sharing to the fediverse (pressed a strange button?). But there are also people *blaming Mastodon* for Meta’s failure to implement full fediverse.

“I think we've talked about this before... fediverse sharing won't ever be finished because most instances refuse to federate with threads and then most fediverse people personal block threads meaning it will never work as it should!”

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2025

If you get an email titled "We updated our Terms of Service" in 2025, you can guarantee it's about using your data for AI purposes. Here's a new T&C from a company I use (I won't name them, as I don't have a problem with this co). "Services" in this case means AI services.

Text: "(v) you authorize [co name] to store and use Input and Output for the purposes of providing you with the Services, to develop and improve the Services, including as part of the design, training and development process for machine learning models."

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/09/2025

So apparently "Blueskyism" is a word, and it has heavy political connotations according to this post by Tim Onion. Ultimately I blame X/Twitter for politicising what social media app you use, but I don't like the idea of being painted as a certain type of […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Tim Onion‬
‪@bencollins.bsky.social‬
"Blueskyism" helped make The Onion one of the largest newspapers in the world in less than a year. If we had spent all of our time on Twitter, we'd be poorer, dumber and terminally ill with internet poisoning. He's [Nate Silver] just angry he's wasting away over there in a nazi agnostic lane that doesn't exist.

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2025

Colossus, the first large-scale electronic digital computer, which was working in Bletchley Park in January 1944. “The prototype Colossus was brought to Bletchley Park in lorries and reassembled by Flowers' engineers. It had approximately 1600 electronic […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Book:

COLOSSUS
The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers
B. JACK COPELAND AND OTHERS

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2025

Google AI Overviews trying to cover its tracks by blaming “some AI models” :) hachyderm.io/@lizardbill/1151231797…

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2025

“As the 21st century dawned, Ziggy Stardust — David Bowie’s most famous personification of an alien — was no longer interested in playing guitar. Now, Ziggy ran a web portal and swapped MP3 files with Weird and Gilly.” cybercultural.com/p/napster-1999

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2025

I admit, I am fascinated by how X users see the internet. I think some of them genuinely don’t know what websites are.

@dhh • 23h
How is it possible to have 3.4 million followers and this level of non-existent engagement?
The Verge :
246.3K posts
@ 342
What my first five Steam purchases say about ...
From theverge.com
• 2.
© 12.
貝
The Verge & @verge • Aug 15
PBS is slashing its budget in response to Trump's attack on public media
@PBS
1782
Follow
The Verge o
@verge
theverge.com covers life in the future.
- Media & News Company © New York theverge.com @ Joined April 2011|
179 Following 3.4M Followers
• 2.7K
il 332K
贝
企
Minimal Nerd & @minimalnerd1
X.com
I think l've figured it out:
All their posts are links to content on their website. They rarely post native content on X to spark conversations.
To comment on their posts, I must read the article on their site and won't return to X to comment, losing initial engagement.

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Richard MacManus @ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/08/2025

I really need to sort out my Mastodon lists. Believe it or not, I did try and consolidate: I have 12 lists currently (with 8 of them ordered), but I used to have more. I think ideally one should have around 6 lists, so that you can click on each list at least […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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