Rewilding Your Attention With An Old-School Blog Index

“ooh! directory” is a Yahoo-like index for hunting down fun, odd blogs

As longtime readers of this blog probably know, I’m low-key obsessed with the idea of “rewilding your attention” — or, how to spend less time staring at the stuff that big-tech algorithms are pushing at you, and more time poking around in the weird corners of culture and the Internet.

Or, as I put it in my original post …

Instead of crowding your attention with what’s already going viral on the intertubes, focus on the weird stuff. Hunt down the idiosyncratic posts and videos that people are publishing, oftentimes to tiny and niche audiences. It’s decidedly unviral culture — but it’s more likely to plant in your mind the seed of a rare, new idea.

I’ve written a bunch about this since, giving suggestions like “9 Ways To Rewild Your Attention”, and locating tools such as search engines designed to surprise you” or to inject serendipity into your Internet surfing.

Recently I stumbled upon a new tool for rewilding one’s mind: “ooh! directory”. Basically, it’s an index of personal blogs, hand-curated by Phil Gyford.

In a sense, it’s a hilarious throwback to a very antediluvian way of organizing the Internet: The…