25 years ago, Mark Steiner and I bought some web space from Dreamhost and started alittlenoise.com. It was just a space for us young graphic designers to play with technology and put it out there. But also a space that we could share with our friends.

We realised in buying hosting, it came with a bunch of bells and whistles that we could share with our mates. So we installed software and experimented on the site. We gave people email addresses when Hotmail addresses were common but unprofessional. We ran a forum called Visual Noise and skinned it to look like ours. We hosted WordPress sites for people who wanted blogs. We were tinkering and learning.

It made me think about how we used the web before social media took off. It was called surfing the web. You would sat down at a computer, maybe checked email, and then just go and explore. It was so much more deliberate. I wasn’t notified. I had to get up off the couch, go to a different room and sit in front of a fat screen monitor that was hard-wired into the wall. You may have had no real destination. You surfed. One link would lead you to another. It was all pull and no push.

That was then. This is now. That website hadn’t changed since 2006. It is a time capsule. Captured in gum. A reflection of web design at its time. Take a look. Built in PHP, it still works. It’s cute too with a fixed width of 700px and font size of 10px.

At its heart, alittlenoise was about a group of people sharing things they found interesting with other people they found interesting. A small corner of the web that belonged to us.

That’s still what this is. What’s coming next is just a new way of doing it.

Talk soon,

Maarten Idema