Cool Site of the Day

» see coolsiteoftheday.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

cool site of the day's peak years overlap with my pre-internet years. glenn davis launched it on august 10 '94, four years before i first dialed up. by the time i was 14 and getting online from ankara on a 33.6k modem the king-of-cool moment was already over. davis had already left, the link-blog format he invented had been swallowed by yahoo directories and was already migrating into the next generation of curation tools. i learned about cool site of the day backwards, the way you learn about anything that ended before you arrived. through wikipedia and through old yahoo directory snapshots.

the original site was simple. glenn davis, a colorado-based web designer, picked one site he found interesting and posted a link to it on his own page with a one-line note. the date was august 10 1994. the early web had under ten thousand servers at the time and yahoo itself was still a stanford student directory. one curated link per day was a usable navigation aid for a population that had nowhere else to start. by mid-'95 the site was getting tens of thousands of visitors a day and newsweek had run a feature on davis in its fifty-most-influential internet people list. the king of cool tag stuck for years afterwards.

in august 1995 davis launched a spinoff called cool site of the year, an annual awards show whose first ceremony ran at the hollywood roosevelt hotel. the spot won the first award. cool site of the year ran for several years and is now most often cited as the format that prefigured the webby awards. davis himself stepped away in november '95 after a dispute with his publishing partner. infi.net took over the site and tried to keep the daily-link tradition going under different editors. for whatever reason the cultural authority did not transfer with the brand, the founder-as-curator energy was the whole product.

the site passed through several owners across the 2000s. by the 2010s it had been pivoted into seo-affiliate content. the daily-link format was kept as a vestigial header but the picks were now whatever ranked. in early february 2020 the entire site was wiped without an announcement, leaving a near-empty homepage with a broken email submission form. nobody publicly claimed responsibility, the brand had quietly stopped belonging to anyone. the domain still resolves in 2026 to a husk of the original.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it invented ~

the one-link-a-day format was the original act of public web curation. before yahoo directory shipped its full taxonomy, before the webring made cross-site discovery a community ritual, glenn davis was just posting one good thing per day from his own page. for some reason that format kept reappearing across the next thirty years. tumblr's reblog culture and the kottke.org house-style of one careful link per post both carry the cool site of the day shape. davis did not invent the link as a primitive but he invented the editorial verb around it. the move was to find one thing worth pointing at and put it on a page each morning.

~ the king of cool moment ~

this is the most-cited piece of the legend. newsweek's '95 profile gave davis the king of cool nickname and dropped him into the same fifty-person list as marc andreessen and tim berners-lee. close enough. the press attention helped him spin up the cool site of the year awards in august '95. for one calendar window in 1995-'96 cool site of the day was the most-watched curation page on the open web. when davis left in november 1995 the press attention left with him, the new editors at infi.net were never named in popular press the way davis had been. for some reason the wikipedia article still leads with the king of cool tag.

~ the long fade ~

the post-davis years are a chain of quiet ownership transfers. the daily link format kept running under successive editors who did not have davis's reach or curation eye. through the 2000s the site survived as a low-traffic brand whose strongest visitors were nostalgic web-1.0 archivists. by the 2010s the operator had repurposed the brand for affiliate seo content with one daily post still appearing as a vestigial habit. the february 2020 wipe was the silent end of even that. nobody filed a shutdown story. the brand had been parked in commerce for a decade by then and nobody outside that small circle missed the daily picks.

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