There’s a sort of timeless appeal in the wall of links. The Drudge Report has done it forever in the most in-your-face way possible; Kottke sends out a nice little newsletter full of links twice a week; here at Nieman Lab we have the What We’re Reading section on our site and newsletter. Now there’s a new one: Clone, a project of the entertainment and culture site Dirt, the crypto-oriented social collective Boys Club, and programmer Spencer Chang.
In a post announcing its launch, Dirt Media CEO Daisy Alioto said Clone was “a throwback to the earlier, smaller internet” and asked Chang what references he drew on.
“I looked back at old catalogs, registries, and other kinds of aggregation spaces like Yahoo’s original home page and early BBS systems,” Chang said. “Yahoo was once completely manually curated by a team of “web surfers” so it felt meaningful to call back to those roots of the internet. These days people often reach for old internet things for the nostalgia, but Clone is really trawling the web collecting these scoops for you.”
Alioto also describes Clone as “your favorite founder’s favorite bookmark,” which…okay. It’s an aggregator of tech and culture news, it’s got clean design, pulls from a bunch of my favorite websites as well as Substacks and whatnot, and it’s pretty fun. There’s a banner headline at the top — as I write this, the banner reads “!!! 1ST AMERICAN POPE !!!” which perhaps gives you an idea of the tone of the whole thing. I don’t have any favorite founders, but I hope any founders who do come across it like it too.
Clone launched yesterday with a webpage, and will eventually include a newsletter roundup. If you go to the site on desktop, your cursor will turn into a sheep that clones itself when you click. What more could you ask for, really?
