The Fray
Fray is currently in a state founder Derek Powazek calls “hiatus” but which sounds more like “there are so many voices all over the place eagerly waiting to pump electrons into someone’s aggregator that our interest model just doesn’t fit anymore”. This is significant because Fray required quite a bit of effort of all parties involved, including the writing of quality, short pieces; the illustration of said pieces by generally professional illustrators; and the administration of the site itself.
I stumbled upon Fray in 1997 and devoured most of the content that existed at the time. In a time when 90% of web pages were written by largely literate folks whose commitment to the user experience rested on finding creative uses of the blink tag, Fray offered up witty, concise, elegantly presented cuts of the lives of all sorts of people. Fray was probably the first serious example of the dreamy prototype of the web as a medium rich in enlightened, progressive MuchLove, which is to say, a prototype of a beautiful vaporware.
There’s still plenty of room for that vision today. It might be argued that—if ever it were important—it’s more important now, what with the massive load of shit that pervades upon the substrate of wires and keyboards connecting all of us. Actually, I say “shit” to mean something more like “all that stuff that people feel like rattling off so far as their wherewithal provides, without any kind of attempted or practical cohesion”; but “shit” is easier to type. How Fray might be revived to fit the interest model of the current web population is a curious sort of idea. I think (and e-mailed Mr. Powazek to this effect) it would be interesting to see Fray become less a centralized effort and more a distributed effort, with some sort of standards of presentation and quality (along with the context of the content) serving as the unifying thread. That sounds a lot like 9rules and its ilk, and maybe that’s something to ponder.
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