MacSurfer Returns Under New Ownership

After a 25-year run, the website MacSurfer closed in 2020. But, as brought to my attention two weeks ago by Nick Heer, MacSurfer quietly returned in June. No one seemed to notice until this month.

The original MacSurfer was a bit of a weird site. Content-wise it was a daily headline aggregator, with no original news or commentary. That made a lot of sense in 1995 and for a few years thereafter, when the web was new. I remember reading it somewhat regularly back then. But one never really “read” MacSurfer — you scanned it. Even the name harks back to the very early web, when, somehow, the idiom “surfing the Internet” took hold. (Thus leading to the name “Safari” for a web browser.) But MacSurfer stopped making as much sense with the advent of RSS, when it became easy to create your own custom aggregated collection of website sources. I didn’t want to dance on MacSurfer’s grave when it closed shop in 2020, but at the time, I couldn’t believe it hadn’t closed long before.

The revived MacSurfer hasn’t changed the concept, so I’m not sure who will read it now either. A firehose has a purpose, but it’s not for drinking.

The other thing that always struck me as strange about MacSurfer is that it was anonymous. There was no credit as to who was behind it. MacDailyNews is similar: longstanding and anonymous, and, to a lesser degree than MacSurfer, a bit of a firehose. But MacDailyNews’s unnamed author adds commentary to his posts. Crackpot wingnut commentary, oftentimes, but commentary nonetheless. Pseudonyms have a long, storied history. But I think it’s weird — and somewhat suspicious — not to put any name at all on your work.

The new MacSurfer, like the old one, remains unsigned. But after Eric Schwarz started blogging about the mysterious return of the site after its half-decade absence, the new owner, Ken Turner, reached out and agreed to an interview.

★ Tuesday, 26 August 2025