Now that the 2000s are suitably retro—those of us around in the 1970s will recall Grease and Happy Days were set two decades before and were deemed nostalgic—I reminisced a bit today about this pre-social media, pre-Kardashian era. (Maybe not quite pre-Kardashian: there was a certain brunette stylist who used to hang out with Paris Hilton.)
We didn’t think of the 2000s as an innocent time. But maybe it was.
I wonder if the era spanning then and now might be recalled or simply forgotten. We might think of tech as having created big, successful businesses, but if history judges those businesses harshly, then their creators will vanish into obscurity. No one really thinks of Enron and Kenneth Lay, or Madoff Securities, in 2024.
I wrote in Lucire issue 49:
As the web was the great leveller, it means barriers to business will become greater to stand out against the drivel. Businesses will need to adopt multimedia or omnimedia presences instead of setting up a web page, which, in the future, might not be found. We may see the return of the human-curated web directory, such as Curlie, the successor to the Open Directory Project, conceived when Yahoo made people wait too long to be listed in the 1990s. And, to parrot the work of Drs Jessica Quillin and Bryce Quillin of It’s a Working Title, companies had better adopt content strategies to tell their stories, because these are effective ways to communicate your brand. Indeed, you need to have a brand, and by that I do not mean merely a logo.
Fashion is an area that needs these narratives, since it is a space where differentiation is not the easiest. Of course, every designer is different—browsing through the features in each issue of Lucire tells us as much. It is possible to differentiate because each designer’s journey is different. But getting word out there about how different will be a challenge, without skilful use of as many communications’ channels as you can muster.
Beauty and travel are in the same boat. It’s all very well to say you’re sustainable, but this is pointless without telling your audience why and how.
The web once lowered barriers to entry but it’s now raised them, which makes it that much harder for independent businesses and hobbyists to get noticed and market themselves without bigger budgets. Those clever stories the Quillins talk about need decent investment and time. And goodness knows we need this innovation.
There are still ways we can get these innovations and stories out there. To help the independent. The fediverse has at least shown that everyday people can successfully create a social network, one that is decentralized. It has the spirit of, say, LinkExchange, a place where members swapped not only links but advertising banners, a marketing cooperative. If enough people use these tools to band together and create new networks, we might foster a destination that’s trustworthy, that everyday people flock to. Some great, geographically localized community sites exist; now we need to repeat this at a global level. I don’t think I mean portals owned by search engines: they came and they died. Something powered by everyday people—that’s more the spirit of 2025.
We sent out a press release in December to say we wanted to move to non-tracking ads in 2025. No ad network, as far as I can find, exists that fits this bill, other than one for tech sites. Is it time for a new LinkExchange? Something that bypasses the tired oligopolies. Maybe it’s the idealist in me, but I still bet on humanity to form communities that get things done.
Jack Yan is founder and publisher of Lucire.
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