I was using my old phone the other day and had a look through the browser tabs saved on it. What I found was a variety of random blogs which reminded me of a fun practice I used to do.
Type three random words into your browser's search engine and there's a good chance you'll come across someone's personal blog in the search results. I just tried this one day and found some really interesting stuff on people's blogs, so kept on using this technique.
These blogs are deeply interesting to me, they give a glimpse into someone else's life, someone living in a totally different part of the world, living a totally different life. These websites harken back to when the internet was a simpler place and people had their own blogs. What makes them unique compared to stuff you can find on youtube, tiktok, instagram, x, etc. is that none of it is performative. It is raw and authentic. They're much like my Meditations newsletter on substack.
Now of course this search method isn't guaranteed to find you one of these blogs, but it has a pretty high hit rate in my experience. I even tried it again after so long and it still works, though it took me two tries to find something good, which is about the expected hit rate I would say. What surprises me is that there is something unique in each of the blogs I visit. Maybe not in the initial post linked from the search engine, but in another post they made in the blog. Unlike most of the content on the internet, these have soul. It is like going out to forage and finding a tasty mushroom, or going mining and finding a shiny gem. These things are hard to find these days on the internet since most content is held within the confines of the major social media companies.
As I opened each browser tab on my phone, I noticed just how fragile the information on the internet is. It’s not something we often think about, the entropy of information on the internet. We usually think everything online is permanent, lasting forever. Most of the websites I visited didn't have a valid ssl certificate, and one of them didn't exist anymore. Thankfully it was snapshotted on the internet archive, but I would've been at least a little sorrowful if it hadn't. I've since made sure each of the websites I had open are saved in the internet archive, because I think it's valuable to preserve people's blogs. It's a reminder that in this digital age, every remnant of our existence can so easily be wiped away. In 10, maybe 20 years, if you were to pass away, it's likely that there will be few traces left of you online, even though we live our entire lives online.
If you would like to try this method out to find some gems of your own, here's how I did it.
on your search engine1, use the phone swipe keyboard2 to generate three random words. They should be uncommon, but not too esoteric. I tend to try words that start with different letters, but that probably isn't necessary.
look through the search results to find a personal blog
check out a few of the entries in the blog before deciding whether or not to keep reading
keep trying until you find something good
These are the websites that I had on my phone. No guarantees that all of them were from this method, but I'm pretty sure most were. Some are more interesting than others so don’t give up if you find one quite boring.
https://michiedo.blogspot.com/2009/04/35-suggestions-for-healthy-home.html?m=1 (this is the one shown in the pic above)
https://stellasspoon.com/2018/08/09/the-great-idea-and-lessons-in-humility/ (this website is no longer available except through the internet archive)
https://barnabyisright.com/2011/07/07/the-peoples-nwo-every-man-his-own-central-banker/
and the one I searched today to test that the method still works. the search query I used was "lyricism occult vacation"
https://komalpurbey-world-of-literature.blogspot.com/2012/05/wb-yeats-leda-swan-and-second-coming.html?m=1
This was the link that first came up, and through there I found this post on one of the author's other blogs, which I personally find more interesting. https://komal-purbey.blogspot.com/2014/08/for-you-my-sis.html
I use duckduckgo because it doesn't use my personal information to show me search results unlike Google (at least not as much, it still uses location unless you disable that)
My phone used the Oppo swype keyboard, which might have slightly different behaviour to your keyboard.
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