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<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPeople have been making lists like this for as long as there have been things worth listing. I\u2019m sure Neanderthals were making lists of mammoths and axes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1968 the Whole Earth Catalog was published, created and edited by Stewart Brand, a biologist, photographer and writer, and published by the Portola Institute, an education non-profit in Menlo Park, California. It was a compendium of product listings, how-to diagrams and educational ephemera, and Brand\u2019s stated goal was \u201caccess to tools\u201d, making a variety of tools accessible to dispersed counterculture communities. MoMA even staged an exhibition about it in 2011, \u201cAccess to Tools: Publications from the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968 to 1974\u201d. The back cover of its final issue carried the phrase \u201cStay hungry. Stay foolish.\u201d, which Steve Jobs later \u201cborrowed\u201d for his 2005 Stanford address.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A curated list like that was a way of enabling people. You have information or know-how, and you want other people to benefit from it. You can\u2019t talk to everyone individually, so the next best thing is to created curated lists so people can find their own way through your knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By the time the internet was made public, around 1992, finding things was near impossible and your horizon was very small. You could use Gopher, search FTP sites, you could get links from friends, but no search, no directories, and no quick access to anything (let\u2019s not even talk about the 9600baud modems we used). Information wasn\u2019t forthcoming and at the time it was hard to see how that thing would ever be more than a fad for nerds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By 1994, two Stanford graduate students built a directory they called \u201cJerry and David\u2019s Guide to the World Wide Web\u201d, a human-edited list of websites (not a search engine). By September 1994 it held more than 2,000 sites and was getting 50,000 hits a day. It became Yahoo and eventually a graveyard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The direct ancestor of the newsletter recommendation list is the circle: sites on the early internet that would link members into a circular list that allowed you to jump from one member to the other following a theme. It was a great way to discover new sites from some you liked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Later, once blogs appeared (ca 1996), circles were replaced by the blogroll. Doc Searls, a journalist, is credited with coining the term in a blog post from 2000. Blogrolls began as static, hand-maintained lists and evolved into dynamic RSS-driven link feeds. Then feeds faded, newsletters came along, and people started making lists again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Substack has a recommendation page, but it\u2019s pretty useless because not many people update them (guilty) and they tend to be very short, as it seems to have been Substack\u2019s idea. Most of the lists I found were little more than that: a writer selects other publications, the mutual networks do the rest. Again, your horizon was fairly limited. Useful for finding a friend\u2019s favourites, less use for finding anything else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then there\u2019s The Family of Man, which I would consider the spiritual ancestor of the this curated list. Edward Steichen, director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curated an exhibition shown from January 24 to May 8, 1955. It was composed of 503 photographs, grouped thematically around subjects common to all cultures: love, children, death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After its initial showing it toured the world for eight years, through thirty-seven countries on six continents, and attracted more than 9 million visitors, which makes it possibly the most visited photography exhibition of all time. The title came from a line in a Carl Sandburg poem. Steichen didn\u2019t take a single one of those 503 photographs himself. He chose them and ordered them, and that was the exhibition. I don\u2019t so much of an imposter thanks to him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Steichen grouped by theme, and so do I, most likely badly: Craft & Education, Gear & Cameras, Astrophotography. Curation is itself a photographic act, and it\u2019s the act of choosing and ordering what other photographers made. I chose the categories and I\u2019m sure someone else could have chosen other categories, more or fewer, along different axes. He had 503 photographs and I have 620+ newsletters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mine isn\u2019t The Family of Man, obviously. In the tradition of early Yahoo, it\u2019s only a directory with a search box and a bunch of categories. But it\u2019s the same idea: decide how you think about things, then put it in order so you can deal with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s built mostly from newsletters I chose to subscribe to (about 350), plus a number of other sources from around the internet. Curation on top of curation, if you like, rationalised, deduped, categorised. The list is searchable by name, author or description, and filterable by category.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019ll be updated over time, because it\u2019s a living thing, not a one-off. Feel free to send me any list you have for inclusion if you\u2019re interested. The categories are the first thing I expect to get wrong and in time I\u2019ll adjust them. They\u2019re my best guess from each newsletter\u2019s self-description or from what I know about it. I want a working list, the kind that gets corrected and added to as time goes on, something that evolves as newsletters evolve and die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n