About New Old Web
New Old Web is written for digital professionals building products, businesses, and careers that depend on an open and accessible internet. We aim to observe and analyze changes and trends that impact your work, identify and explain the tools, techniques, and strategies to succeed, and ultimately return the internet to being a fun, exciting, and productive place to work.
New Old Web is a blog. It’s mostly written by the partners and staff at Alley and Lede. At Alley, we design, build, and launch websites for news media and non-profits. In 2020, we launched Defector, the “Last Good Website.” Defector gave rise to Lede, our platform for independent publishers. We hope to build many more good websites, but we have questions! And concerns!
The internet we grew up with was fun, flexible, and pretty wild. By the time most of us at Alley started our careers in the mid aughts, Google and Facebook were careening towards their monopolistic destinies. When we founded Alley in 2010, independent websites were already getting most of their visitors from these two sources. This traffic blend has shifted — sometimes fast, and sometimes slow — over the last fifteen years, mostly in ways that resulted in greater revenue for the internet’s self-appointed gatekeepers.
While we can appreciate new technologies and new ways of accessing information, we have questions about who benefits from them and why. We miss the old internet and insist that new technologies make the web more accessible, more open, and more fun, for news organizations, for nonprofits, and for technologists like us. We think the old values — open source software, open protocols, and good old HTTP — should play as central a role in the future of the internet as they’ve played in its past.
Learning to live with the behemoths — and the would-be behemoths — is a constant challenge for products and businesses that depend on people finding and connecting with their content; work that's become increasingly challenging as walled-garden platforms strip-mine ideas, traffic, and revenue from content originators. This is a landscape designed for a few firms to win big rather than for many firms to thrive, which is antithetical to the original promise of the internet. We refuse to accept the current state of affairs as a fait accompli and, with this blog, we aim to help you navigate and thrive in an ever-changing world of algorithms, technological advances, and trends.