I’m giving a talk at Startup Cincy Week on October 5, and slide decks don’t come naturally to me, so instead I wrote this essay and made a website instead: yourcorneroftheinternet.com.
Your corner of the internet
- Planted:
I think more people ought to have personal websites.
Most of the websites people visit regularly belong to businesses, like newyorker.com or cafemochiko.com. Nike designs nike.com to make you feel like you would in their flagship store in SoHo. For your personal site, you might design it like you’d arrange your living room, kitchen, or garden. You want a nice space for yourself, alone, and maybe to share with others. Your website can have words and artifacts that signal to your friends, family, and strangers what you like, what you care about, and what you want to talk about. Books, essays, movies, favorite quotes, music, photographs, doodles, recipes, local goings-on, a tutorial on replacing the headlights of a 2005 Subaru Forester—whatever.
You are raising a beacon to attract others who like and care about the same things. Henrik Karlsson says it well: A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox. In other words: Share your interests in public, and over time people who you’ll enjoy talking to will find you. A personal website makes you legible.1 Visitors get a sense of who you are, and they might want to befriend or hire you.
A personal website can be literally anything you want it to be. And that’s the point—it’s yours: Your corner of the internet.2 The walled gardens of social media will come and go, but a website is your space forever. Friends and strangers who visit your space on the internet can choose to do so freely. The algorithm won’t change on you overnight. A personal website can be a low stakes creative outlet, a powerful career building tool, or anything in between. At worst, it’s one burrito—i.e. $10-15 a year3—for a blank canvas waiting for you whenever you’re ready.
You may not even want your own website, at least not now (“what would I do with it?”). That’s ok. If you’re not interested in your own site, you might consider buying a domain as a gift for the right friend or family member. I’m thinking of that creative sibling or parent or friend of yours who you think ought to share their work with the world. I don’t mean work in the sense that it must be polished or professional, or feel like “work” at all. It’s easy to forget that it’s a recent development that we can share our work with the general public at all. In her book Extremely Online, Taylor Lorenz reminds us.
It’s hard to remember how novel this was. Before the blog era, if you wanted to share your ideas with the public, you had to make it past layers upon layers of legacy gatekeepers. Letters to the editor, call-ins to the radio, article or book submissions—all had to be approved by a faceless authority at a moated institution.
I like to write, so for someone like me it’s good fortune that I was born in an era where I can make a website and write to the world without needing anyone’s approval. But I’m no exception—we’re all writing more publicly than we ever have been, collectively. In Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch examines just how weird and wonderful this explosion of informal writing all over the internet is—across blogs, Reddit threads, Twitter, and the like—and how informal internet writing is changing language itself at an unprecedented pace (Adam Aleksic’s Algospeak is another good book on the subject). But so much good, clever, beautiful writing (and singing, painting, photography, etc.) is stuck in private email back-and-forth and group chats. That’s fine—I’m all for private correspondence—but I’m also rooting for more people to share some of that creativity with the world, on their personal website.
I’ve bought domains for a handful of friends and family members over the years. My brother spent an hour or so setting up a simple website where he can share videos of himself playing guitar and singing, for example. As far as I can tell—and it’s notoriously hard to pretend liking a gift—the domains I’ve given have been well received. When I gift a domain, I always tell the recipient that it includes me as a consultant of sorts for website building and brainstorming purposes. (If I’ve given you a domain and you’re reading this now, that offer still stands!)
If you don’t own your domain yet, I hope you’ll buy for yourself first, even if you don’t know what to do with it yet. You don’t have to identify as techie—or young or creative or anything—to be a good candidate for a personal website. Everyone has something interesting to store in their nook on the internet. I often tell people that no one will visit your website at first, and that’s a good thing. People will only go there if you send them a link. When you start out, your website is a little forest where your trees fall silently. Or a digital garden4 where you can plant seeds, water them, prune, propagate, and re-pot. That means you have time to explore, experiment, and tinker. You can find your voice and style over time. Again, you’re not beholden to that algorithm everyone is always talking about.
But speaking of algorithms, if you are a social media regular, you may be interested in a possible future wherein your personal domain is your “internet handle,” where handle means your username on a social media platform or other app. Instead of being nora95 on Twitter and Instagram and heyitsnora on TikTok (because nora95 was taken, ugh) and yoganora on Strava, there’s a future where you can be @nora.com everywhere.5
Your domain itself can be a signal of who you are and what your website is about. Do you make your home on the internet at the neutral firstlastname.com? Or if you’re lucky, lastname.com (so you can have first@lastname.com as your email address)?6 Or the goofy firstname.lol? Or the proud parent, firstname.mom or firstname.dad? Or the never-left-New-York firstname.nyc? Do you use a pseudonym? Or something other than a name entirely? Do you make many sites for all sides of your personality, with recipes on something.cooking, sculpture on something.art, and freeform writing on something.garden?
There are hundreds of expressive .com alternatives to consider: .art, .food, .me, .mom, .dad, .beer, .cool, .earth, .wtf, .fyi, and on and on. And as I write this, we’re in the middle of a major expansion of the namespace, where soon we’ll have hundreds more .words to choose from. Personally, I love the artistic touch of choosing a domain ending that fits your taste, but I do also like owning my full name dot com because, well, it’s my name. If in doubt, just buy yourname.com. You can later buy multiple domains and point them to the same website, or just hold onto them (I have pete.garden also pointing to my personal website, for example).
Buying a domain can be quite a rush, actually. If you’ve never purchased a domain: When you get to the end of this sentence, open up a registrar (like Cloudflare or Porkbun) and find your corner of the internet.
Footnotes
[1] I get that people have privacy concerns, i.e. you might not want to be legible. That’s totally valid, so if you’re in that camp and still want a website, a pseudonym or no name at all is an option. The internet welcomes anonymity (meme: no one knows you’re a dog on the internet). ↩
[2] I am pretty darn sure I first read the phrase “my corner of the internet” on my friend Danny’s blog, where it still greets you, btw. I also noticed it again, and loved it again, as the tagline for mmm.page, an “internet canvas” (i.e. a cool tool for making artsy websites). ↩
[3] A domain is a gift that keeps on giving—er, rather, that you keep on giving—because domains must be renewed yearly. $10.46, the going rate for a dot com in 2026, is a relatively low price of entry, so hopefully the financial burden doesn’t stop you. ↩
[4] A digital garden is a type of blog—a blogging philosophy, really—where instead of each post needing to be a polished piece of formal writing frozen in time, you write freely and mark what you’ve written as unfinished or in progress etc. Maggie Appleton is a prominent digital gardener of this era, and she wrote a wonderful history of digital gardening in her own garden. ↩
[5] Surely there exists an actual nora95, but I pulled this example out of the random name generator in my brain. So if you’re reading this, Nora, well, what a small world. Also, not only is the gold rush for new handles silly, it also gets financialized (unsurprisingly). Just like there is Serious Money in the secondary market for domain names, there are also secondary markets for Twitter/Instagram/et al. usernames. Even vanity phone numbers (like 1-800-GOT-JUNK) have secondary markets. Twitter under Elon—X—brought its market in-house, selling inactive handles for thousands to millions of dollars per handle. ↩
[6] You can even hand out email addresses to everyone in your family. My own lastname.com, it turns out, is owned by a furniture company in Hudson Valley, New York. They’ve been in operation since 1858! I’d love to pay a visit to the store someday. I’m not aware of any relation, but it’s run by a father and his son, whose name is...Pete. As much as I’d love to own the domain, I’m at peace knowing it’s put to good use. ↩