THE INTERWEB FOR GROWN-UPS:

Denis Dutton, Intellectual Entrepreneur (Robert Cottrell, 1/12/11, NY Review of Books)

As others have remarked before me, Dutton was, in effect, a master of the tweet long before Twitter was invented. He knew how to capture and project in just a few words, not so much the essence of a story, as the zest or the mystery of it. Really, it was the opposite of precis writing. Having read Dutton’s teaser, instead of thinking, “Well, now I know what that’s about,” your reaction would be, “What on earth is that about?” and you would click dutifully on the “more»” link to find out.

For a man of his age and background—a non-techy, 50-something, university professor—Dutton was a crucial few years ahead of his time in understanding the Internet. He saw its potential as a publishing platform. (He was also an early publisher of e-books.) He anticipated information overload. With ALD, he identified a market for what media people now call “curating,” which is to say, selecting and recommending content for a particular audience. All this was at a time when the Web was still, by and large, a morass of dial-up connections and bad typography in need of a decent search engine. (In 1998, Google was still in a garage.)

One of ALD’s many strengths was the old-fashioned restraint and elegance of its site design. It aspired, not to the kinetics of any other contemporary website, but to the untroubled air of an 18th-century broadsheet. (Dutton also cited the influence of a 19th-century New Zealand paper, the Lyttelton Times.) It posed as a website for grown-ups. It was as if Dutton operated a back-channel on the internet for older and grander people who otherwise considered reading on a computer to lie somewhere between a perversion and an impossibility.