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ISSUE :: FEBRUARY 2004:: COVER STORY/ONLINE
The
Best Way to ... Tired of Visiting the Same Sites Day After Day? Try These Strategies.
There are millions of Web sites out there. How many do you use? If you're like most people, it's probably not very many. Time is limited, the Web is vast-and the handful of Web sites you visit regularly seem just fine.
But know this: Your lack of Web adventure means you're missing out on a wealth of information, knowledge and whimsy online. And to find it, you just have to know whom to ask. In fact, there's a small army of professionals and volunteers who scour the Internet every day, and they deliver their findings in easily accessible sites. Scores of directories, for instance, help organize the chaos of the Web and spotlight new and noteworthy sites. The online diaries known as Web logs also are full of links to the odd corners of the Web. And professional librarians keep track of the more authoritative online resources for researchers. "If you think about the Web, there's a ton of interesting stuff and a ton of uninteresting stuff," says Rachael Bower, director of the Internet Scout Project, which collects Web resources for educators and researchers. "Separating the wheat from the chaff is what we do best." Finding novelty used to be much easier. Early versions of the Netscape Web browser featured a "What's New" button, which linked you to a list of recently added Web sites. Marc Andreessen, Netscape's co-founder, would put together the list by hand from sites submitted by their creators: NASA's collection of space images, the menu of an Indian restaurant in England, reprints from academic journals. "At the time, it was actually pretty simple; there would be about one new Web page a day," says Mr. Andreessen. "Then it started to snowball." Netscape dropped the feature in mid-1996, when the number of new sites outstripped Mr. Andreessen's ability to keep up. But while it may not be possible-or desirable-to keep up with everything, it's very possible to expand your Internet horizons. Here are some strategies for doing it: Yahoo Directory One of the best sources of new sites is one of the oldest: the Yahoo directory. The Web portal got its start as an easily searchable list of sites compiled by founders Jerry Yang and David Filo. While Yahoo has added a host of other features, the directory-compiled and maintained by a staff of editors-is a simple place to find what's new and cool online. Every day, Yahoo's editors post a list of the several hundred sites that they've added to the directory that day (dir.yahoo.com/new), highlighting three of the most notable. In addition, editors single out one site every day in the Yahoo Picks section (picks.yahoo.com). Sites are selected for innovations in Web design, for their emotional poignancy or for representing some hot trend. Recent picks included TheOneRing.net (theonering.net), a site devoted to the "Lord of the Rings" books and films; and Tiny Mix Tapes (tinymixtapes.com), a site that offers "fun and fussy" reviews of undiscovered music. "It's a nice, diverse roundup of stuff that's compelling to a group of people who spend their days and nights online," says Srinija Srinivasan, Yahoo's editor in chief. "There are just going to be some things that rise above the fray." Stay Cool Many Web sites offer regularly updated "cool sites"-other sites that are considered worthy of a visit. To get a glimpse at some of these, you just need to type "cool site" into any of the big search engines. The granddaddy of them all is the Cool Site of the Day (CoolSiteoftheDay.com), an early-Net holdover that, despite a series of ownership changes, still dishes up a daily sampling of what's new and innovative on the Web. The site also maintains an archive going back to August 1994, where early selections include Netscape (Oct. 13, 1994) and the Central Intelligence Agency (Dec. 28, 1994). The sites are chosen by Cool Site's small group of editors, but with a twist: Sites pay $27 to be considered for inclusion and an additional $9 a month for one year to be kept in the archives. "We address two types of visitors," says Mike Corso, Cool Site's president and chief executive, "the general surfer looking for cool and different sites, and Webmasters looking for exposure." The trend-spotting features of the big search engines, such as Google's Zeitgeist and Yahoo's Buzz Index, track patterns among frequently searched terms. Although they can occasionally turn up new and interesting sites, they mostly highlight already widespread pop-culture obsessions, like Kobe Bryant or Jennifer Lopez. An exception is Lycos 50 (50.lycos.com)-the trend-spotting corner of Lycos.com-thanks to Aaron Schatz, who writes a five-times-a-week column for the site about interesting search trends. He also writes a daily Web log where he features his own "cool link of the day," such as the Burnt Food Museum ("celebrating the art of culinary disaster") and a site devoted to comic-book writer Alan Moore, author of "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen." Follow the Blogs In addition to hired hands like Mr. Schatz and the Yahoo editors, an ever-growing army of amateur bloggers are scouring the Web and serving up links to nearly all corners of the Internet. "I think the blog world is the best way to find new sites," Mr. Schatz says. "When they find something cool, they link to it." Still, sorting through thousands of individual blogs in search of the new can be tedious. An easier way can be found at "community" blogs, such as Memepool (memepool.com) or MetaFilter (metaFilter.com), which collect submissions from groups of contributors. Memepool, started in 1998, is hard to categorize. Created by Joshua Schachter, whose day job is in a financial-services firm, the site is a collection of links submitted by a group of about 20 to 30 approved contributors on topics as diverse as games and linguistics, humor and transportation, and politics and typography. Mr. Schachter screens submissions to weed out links based on "whether I think it's lame or interesting," he says. MetaFilter, in contrast, is an old-fashioned Internet discussion board, on which more than 17,000 members post comments and links, and the result is a much more open-ended and extensive gateway to the odd corners of the Web. Scout's Honor Librarians and academicians, as might be expected, need to keep up with the latest in online resources, and they can turn to several sites for help, including Merlot, the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (Merlot.org), and the Librarians' Index to the Internet (lii.org). One of the best is the Internet Scout Report (scout.cs.wisc.edu), a project of the computer-sciences department at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Since 1994, the report has published a weekly listing of sites of interest to researchers and educators in the U.S. Using a graduate-student researcher, the Scout Report each Friday gives detailed descriptions of about a dozen Web pages on such topics as the arts, business and social science. (Separate biweekly reports cover life sciences, physical sciences and technology resources.) The list also includes general-interest sites, such as a fan site for actor Cary Grant and the home page of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a bad-writing competition sponsored by the English department of San Jose State University in California. "We try to have a nice eclectic mix," says Ms. Bower, director of the Scout project. It's easy to get lost in the Internet Scout's archive of more than 17,000 sites and mailing lists, which can be searched by topic or by date of publication. A tour through one issue last year found Intel's online Technology Journal and an online exhibit by the Chicago Public Library about the history of the city's sewer system, including a link to the city "sewer cam" monitoring cameras. |
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