For the third year, the Tiny Awards have released their list of finalists that represent “the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web.” Voting is now open and runs until the end of this month, closing on September 1.
I was on the judging committee this year, returning after a year away to focus on the final XOXO, and helped narrow down the finalists from 176 nominated websites.
I love this little low-stakes contest, and the experience of being bombarded with so many great weird experimental projects is an honor for me.
Like my roundup two years ago, here’s a little about each of this year’s 11 finalists to help inform your vote.
Last week, we released the talks from the final XOXO.
In the eight years that Andy McMillan and I put on XOXO, we had so many wonderful talks—you can peruse the featured tag for some of our favorites from the full archive—but I think we both agreed this was the single best day of talks we ever had.
The consistency was so high, it was clear every speaker understood the assignment. Every talk is worth watching.
The Talks
“We can build the web we want to see.” Molly White kicked off XOXO 2024’s conference with a hopeful talk about building Web3 Is Going Just Great and how we can “push the web back towards the wonderful, joyful, beautiful place it used to be.”
I started the project as a bit of a goof, launching on Kickstarter on May 12, 2009, only 14 days after Kickstarter itself launched. I wanted to test out the platform I’d helped to build, to see what the experience was like as a creator. For years, I’d also wondered what “chiptune jazz” might sound like, and figured this was a good way to do both.
Ello launched on August 7, 2014 with big dreams and big promises, a new social network defined by what it wouldn’t do.
They laid it all out in a manifesto, right on their homepage:
Your social network is owned by advertisers.
Every post you share, every friend you make and every link you follow is tracked, recorded and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are the product that’s bought and sold.
We believe there is a better way. We believe in audacity. We believe in beauty, simplicity and transparency. We believe that the people who make things and the people who use them should be in partnership.
We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce and manipulate — but a place to connect, create and celebrate life.
You are not a product.
From its launch, Ello defined itself as an alternative to ad-driven social networks like Twitter and Facebook. “You are not a product.” (The “I Disagree” button linked to Facebook’s privacy page.)
I’d link to that manifesto on Ello’s site, but I can’t, because Ello is dead.
In June 2023, the servers just started returning errors, making nine years of member contributions inaccessible, apparently forever — every post, artwork, song, portfolio, and the community built there was gone in an instant.
How did this happen? What happened between the idealistic manifesto above and the sudden shutdown?
It’s a story so old and familiar, I predicted it shortly after Ello launched.
If you’re in the Portland, Oregon area, I’ll be at Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills this Thursday interviewing Matt Kirkland, the creator of the enormously popular Dracula Daily, which originally serialized Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel as a Substack newsletter, creating an internet-scale book club with over 240,000 subscribers, now published as a gorgeous hardcover volume annotated with memes, fan art, and comics from the community.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is an epistolary novel, told in the form of a series of diary entries and letters, and Dracula Daily delivers each one to subscribers “as-it-happens,” on the day that each message is dated, pacing it out over a period of six months from May to November.
In the parallel universe of last year’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, Dr. Demento encourages a young Al Yankovic (Daniel Radcliffe) to move away from song parodies and start writing original songs of his own. During an LSD trip, Al writes “Eat It,” a 100% original song that’s definitely not based on any other song, which quickly becomes “the biggest hit by anybody, ever.”
Later, Weird Al’s enraged to learn from his manager that former Jackson 5 frontman Michael Jackson turned the tables on him, changing the words of “Eat It” to make his own parody, “Beat It.”
This got me thinking: what if every Weird Al song was the original, and every other artist was covering his songs instead? With recent advances in A.I. voice cloning, I realized that I could bring this monstrous alternate reality to life.
Earlier this month, I wrote about Tiny Awards, a tiny prize to honor websites that “best embodies the idea of a small, playful and heartfelt web.” I was invited to be a part of the inaugural award’s selection committee, and helped narrow down the 270 submissions to 16 finalists, which were then open to public voting.
This morning, Tiny Awards announced the winner: the dizzying and delicious Rotating Sandwiches by Lauren Walker. When I linked to it here back in March, I described it simply as the “best of the web, right here,” so I’m pretty happy with this result. Lauren will receive a $500 prize and a tiny trophy. Congrats!
The organizers of the award also released the full list of all 272 nominated websites, a “dizzying snapshot of the boundless creativity and artistic endeavor (and, occasionally, silliness) of the web (and, by extension, the people who make it).”
The organizers originally asked each member of the selection committee to decide on their top two picks from the full list of nominees. Given the volume, diversity, and quality of the entries, this was no easy task.
Now that the winner’s announced, I thought I’d share my own decision-making process, along with my personal list of runners-up.
In May, the creators of two of my favorite newsletters, Naive Weekly and Web Curios, reached out to see if I’d consider joining the selection committee of Tiny Awards, a tiny prize to honor websites that “best embodies the idea of a small, playful and heartfelt web.” I loved the idea and quickly accepted.
There were some additional rules: sites must have launched in the last 12 months, work on mobile and desktop without requiring an app or download, made by individuals or a group of creators (i.e. not agencies or brands), and should be primarily non-commercial.
Nominations were free and open to the public, unlike some other web awards, and the selection committee ended up reviewing over 270 submissions, which we narrowed down to a shortlist of 16 finalists, a wonderfully eclectic collection of websites.
The winner is decided by public voting, which is also free and easy, and closes next Thursday, July 20. I hope you take a look and cast your vote. Here’s a little about each of the finalists. Update:The winner was announced!
For the last two days, Elon Musk has claimed that Twitter is under attack from “several hundred organizations” who were conducting “EXTREME levels of data scraping,” forcing them to bring “large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis” and enact emergency measures.
Yesterday, Twitter started blocking all logged-out access to Twitter, requiring signing in to view any tweet or profile. Elon Musk called it a “temporary emergency measure,” claiming they “were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”
Apparently, it didn’t stop the crush of traffic and, this morning, Musk announced they escalated their actions against supposed “extreme levels of data scraping” by rate-limiting the number of tweets you can view.
Under the moniker Miniatua, Montreal designer Nicolas Temese makes hyperrealistic scale replicas of vintage computers, real and fictional, in stunning detail with animated displays and period-accurate LED lights.
His latest project is a scratch-built 1:12 model of David Lightman’s bedroom from 1983’s WarGames, complete with IMSAI 8080 microcomputer, 8″ inch floppies, Epson RF 80 FT dot matrix printer, JVC model HR-3300 VHS VCR, and 1960s Naugahyde Steelcase Armless chair, among dozens of other smaller props.
