Ooh.directory: a place to find good blogs that interest you

Just worked on adding categories to Kagi Small Web (inspired in part by OOH) last night.

https://kagi.com/smallweb

This did give it a new dimension.

Each has its own RSS feed too as well.

I am pretty happy with https://marginalia-search.com/. It's kind of my secondary search engine at this point. I can always search for anything and find indie websites writing about the topic.

It also helps with the dread of not having to add my personal site to yet another blog curation site which I don't know will:

1. Be maintained in the longer term.

2. Would be willing to add my site to the curation site.

The problem with https://ooh.directory/ is that nobody can tell what gets added and what doesn't. Submissions go through an opaque review process and a lot of good submissions don't make it.

Just try searching your favorite bloggers in ooh.directory. 9 out of 10 times they'll be missing from the directory.

I'd prefer a more transparent directory where we can can tell why something is or isn't added.

I was looking at the RSS spec a while back to figure out how the category field was supposed to work and ended up digging up web directory history.

https://alexsci.com/blog/rss-categories/

Syndic8, DMOZ, NewsIsFree, and TX (lost to history?) used the same taxonomy approach seen on ooh.directory. All are defunct now, but DMOZ appears to live on as curlie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories

Technically, we could tag our RSS feeds with the taxonomy defined by ooh.dir, which would allow us to automatically sort blogs into topic groups, but I haven't found a single feed that uses the approach. We end up with ad-hoc category labels that are challenging to deduplicate, or more often, uncategorized blogs.

Given how worried everyone is about the AI slopocalypse where the internet is drowned in LLM-generated junk content maybe it's time for a resurgence of human curated directories like this one.

I am a fan of https://blogs.hn/. It is mostly HN-like content, but I visit it daily. I wish there was a "new" view though.

Nice nostalgia but are these directories actually being used by anyone?

From what I have seen over the years, the problem with such aggregation sites has been that the maintainer eventually loses interest or does not renew the domain etc.

The only way to maintain long term interest in such sites would be to have it as a github site/or a long term commitment, community contributions with some kind of community filtering/voting to maintain the quality of submissions.

Finding niche, personal blogs has become so difficult lately because search results are dominated by massive corporate sites and SEO-optimized junk. This is a great way to actually discover the 'small web' again. It reminds me why I started following RSS feeds in the first place.

A good idea, and one I had myself recently.

Some suggestions: I know none of us like "the algorithms choosing", but I think we can do better than alphabetical order. Number of clicks you see (popularity), or number of inbound links google tells you about would be good.

I also think you've gone to great effort, but it's still very light in some categories. I hope you keep going - what's your data source? Are you tracking outbound links from the ones you have indexed to find new blogs?

the google is dying narrative usually misses the fact that the incentive loop for niche blogs is just broken right now. we're caught between writing for the 'helpful content' algorithm or writing for actual humans. curated directories like this are basically the only way to bypass the seo arms race and find real domain expertise again.

I'm subscribed to the Index Issue (i think that's the name) which has a nice short list of curated blogposts. Works for me!

Granted, I'd love a more technical version. Perhaps anyone here could start one?

Make an RSS list, pick the ones out you liked and BAM, you got my sub :)

> No blogs or categories were found matching emacs.

OK then.

This is great. Some good nostalgia vibes.

The fact that it’s not exhaustive and is a reflection of the creator’s taste is a feature, not a bug.

the internet got just a little bit more human again.

https://minifeed.net is another similar site that I’ve enjoyed.