The Arbiters of Cool (12-95)

art by: Christian Northeast/Reactor Design Ltd.

They're the Siskels and Eberts of the bandwidth, deciding what's cool, the worst or simply useless. But who are these guys -- and are they cool?

"I want people to feel like they aren't safe. I'm hoping that knowing they could be singled out will scare people into making their pages better." -Mirksy of his Worst of the Web site
"It would be hard to be an arbiter of cool on the Web since one of the key pleasures for most users is being the admiral of their own expedition." - Ryan Holznagel of The Point
"Ninety percent of the web is pure dreck. Part of the reason is that it's easy. It's the same way everyone can paint, but not everyone paints well." -Glenn Davis, Cool Site of the Day
"I discovered a whole undercurrent of desire to point this kind of thing out," -Paul Phillips, creator of Useless Pages
"Geekiness is a cool little trend, in the same way that roller derby was trendy. Most people find it interesting to gawk at but would never actually want to participate." -Scott Ruthfield of Geek Site of the Day

Once, in a forgotten time, "cool" meant chilly. No more. A recent Webcrawler search brought up 10,894 references to "cool sites." One of the first places a new user visits (checks out) will likely be one of the many links highlighting web sites as cool since most on-line services now list these links in their own lists of top sites. But as the Web has expanded, these arbiters have not always been satisfied to simply deem what is cool or not. Sites have popped up defining the useless, the mediocre or of interest only to geeks. One Harvard University graduate even decided that with all the interest in finding good sites, it seemed necessary to highlight the worst. We decided to find out the stories behind these sites and how they decide what to put on their lists. But more importantly, we wanted to know: Who the hell do they think they are, anyway?

Cool Site of the Day
http://cool.infi.net

Glenn Davis was once a lonely recluse who
 collected tolls on a interstate turnpike. Now, he's
 an on-line celebrity, with a web site that attracts
 more than 40,000 hits daily. He sorts through more
 than 200 e-mails every afternoon, most from people
 asking him to just look at their web sites. A few
 even try to bribe him.
        "The best was from a couple. This guy said he
 would have the Cool Site of the Day logo tattooed on
 his wife's buttocks."
       Davis jokes that he literally fell into the job
 from which he started Cool Site of the Day. He had
 tripped and sprained his ankle, which forced to miss a
 lot of time from his job as a foreman in a factory in
 Norfolk, Va.  Stuck at home, bored and lonely, he
 heard about a company that offered Internet hook-ups. 
       "I called them up and said ëHow much is it?'"
 Within an hour, he hobbled in with his foot in a cast
 and  slapped a check for $144 into the palm of one of
 the office workers for a year's worth of access. 
       With not a lot else to do, Davis started
 hanging out in his access provider's office. So much,
 they finally just hired him. He ran a bulletin board
 service and worked as a systems administrator,
 spending his spare time poking around the Web as it
 developed. Davis developed a hobby of finding sties
 he liked, then showing them to other people in the
 office. One day last August, he mentioned setting up
 a site to direct people to his links. His boss put
 him to work on it the next day. 
        "At first, it was hard to find sights," Davis
 said. "There were people who told me that I wouldn't
 last a month." In the beginning, he had just a handful
 of hits. Then 200. Then 400. Now, more than 40,000
 users hit Cool Site of the Day (CoSotD for short).
 Even the early sites he chose pale to today's sites
 largely due to Netscape and the advances it allowed
 HTML programmers.
      Davis chose "cool" after mulling over a number of
 other adjectives. "Great" didn't seem quite right;
 "neat" was just too geeky. Cool, he decided, seemed
 universally understood. "Every English speaking person
 understands the world ëcool,' I really believe that."
 Now the word plagues him. Not only does it seem the
 most overly used descriptive piece of language used
 throughout the 'net, he feels out of place using it
 describe anything else, including himself. "For years,
 I was very withdrawn. At parties, I would sit back in
 the corner. Now I don't do that. I go out, I talk to
 strangers."
        "I had no idea Cool Site of the Day would take
 off like it would. But I have more self confidence now.
 Sometimes, I'm downright arrogant. But I have friends
 who I have given pins to puncture my head if I get too
 bad. I'm not as bad as I used to be."
        He says that at least he does not list long book-
 jacket-like endorsements on his site. Bob Alison, who
 runs the Spider's Picks, requires viewers to scroll down
 a full screen of such backpats before getting to his
 lists. (Alison declined our requests for a phone
 interview.)  
        Davis now does most of his work from his
 efficiency apartment, rather than in the cubicle at
 Infinet. At home, he's surrounded by a Spiderman doll,
 a 7-up Spot character (which he poses when he gets
 bored) and a pewter wizard holding a crystal ball. Both
 computers sit amid piles of messy papers, mostly notes
 with unidentified phone numbers on them.
       He has two screens for his Mac, one so that he can
 cull through his daily e-mail while he waits for sites
 to load up on the other one. He reads all his e-mail, he
 said, even if he doesn't answer it. About half of the
 e-mail requests he receives to review sites come from
 women now.
       "What makes a site cool? If you read my FAQ, I look
 at content, style graphics and personality. If it has
 something over the others, after I look at all those, I
 look at whether its cool or not. There's no science, it's
 just my editorial judgment."
       Davis usually knows within a few minute if he can
 determine if a sight is "cool" or not. Most of the time,
 he just mutters "ugh" and moves on.  "Ninety percent of
 the web is pure dreck," he said. "Part of the reason is
 that it's easy. Sure, everyone can do it, but not every-
 one can do it well. It's the same way everyone can paint,
 but not everyone paints well. This is a new medium.
 People are exposed to tools they never had before."
 Davis' believes his success can be measured by the
 numbers of servers he routinely crashes. In the 'net
 world, recognition can be a dicey thing. One site, a
 crime scene investigation  received more than 100,000
 hits the day it was mentioned in CoSotD. The site's
 creator was promptly kicked off his server. 
      "Sometimes that happens,'' Davis conceded.
 "There's a company in New York called Interport. I
 can't feature any of their clients' pages because they
 won't let me. I'll crash their servers," he said.
 "Does it make me feel bad? Sometimes, yeah. If my fea-
 turing a sight causes them to lose their ability to
 publish on the Web it does. I actually enjoy crashing a
 server, though. It just says, "Hey I'm showing this
 stuff to people. That's what I want to do. I really
 enjoy discovering the little guy who worked hard on
 his page and deserves the recognition."

Worst of the Web
http://www.turnpike.net/wow/Worst.html

On the flip side of  Glenn Davis, there's
 Mirsky, a Harvard University graduate who puts to-
 gether a daily Worst of Web.  Mirksy, who goes only
 by one name for "professional reasons," started Worst
 on the Web about a year ago, in direct response to
 the Cool Site of the Day and other lists like it.
 To him, it seemed like everyone with a web site had
 their own set of "cool" links. So why not one with
 the worst?
     "I consider myself a humor writer," Mirsky said.
 "I tried to do freelance humor writing on TV. I
 started thinking that maybe I could do some humor
 for companies on-line." So he started spending time
 browsing the Web. "When you start using it, it's
 exciting, you get excited over everything. But then
 you become more savvy and start to realize that
 there's a lot of bad stuff too."
     He wasn't sure if he would have enough material
 to keep up the site everyday. Now he finds, there's
 plenty of bad stuff, just not all of it seems funny.
 He tries to find the most obscure sites possible by
 going deep into personal directories or scanning the
 entire lists of service providers.
      Mirsky said he's e-mailed Davis, but never got-
 ten a response. On the other hand, Mirsky said he gets
 "flooded" with mail each day, but responds to all of
 it. "I guess I have a particular resentment for Cool
 Site of the Day. I personally feel like I have to
 respond to all the mail I can get. People send me
 nominations for WOW, but I have to know what people
 are thinking about my site. I don't really think Cool
 Site of the Day is providing anything special. If
 anything, it just helped bastardize the word ëcool.'"
      Mirksy doesn't just put up bad sites, he puts up
 sites that are lacking thought before execution, in-
 complete or with questionable taste. In a sense, he
 polices the Web, pointing out things that are inter-
 esting, funny and sometimes, ought not to be there.
 Something that bothers him is the sheer volume of
 self-indulgence. 
       "I want people to feel like they aren't safe.
 I'm hoping that knowing they could be singled out
 will scare people a little bit into making their
 pages better." The greatest trespasses are by those
 people who put pages online before completing them.
 The landscape of incomplete or poorly executed sites
 lends the Web its amateurish quality. "It makes the
 Web look shoddy. People really need to develop their
 stuff off-line first."
       Even with the exponential increase in the number
 of pages, Mirsky can't always find bad pages. Well, he
 can find just plain bad pages, but not pages that are
 funny. The former Harvard Lampoon writer searches the
 Web (he disdains the word "surfing") in the bedroom of
 his parents home in suburban Boston. Each morning, he
 climbs down from the top bunk bed, the safety rail
 still attached, to the wall where his two robes hang
 at the ready, one heavy duty, the other lightweight.
        "Most days, I don't even get dressed. I sit in
 my bathrobe. I stand there in my underwear, determining
 which one I'll need that day." Sometimes, he'll surf for
 hours and not come up with anything suitable for his
 site. Searching the Web seems tiring to him now. He
 said he's not getting paid much from Volant, a Boston-
 based service provider, to put together Worst on the
 Web, and he's hoping to include some sponsorship soon.
 At least it lets him stay away from his series of bad
 day jobs.
        "The worst job I ever had was to photocopy this
 400-page manual on a regular copier. Another was when
 I had to type in a list of all the doctors in Germany.
 Those kinds of jobs helped me in a way. I learned to
 work fast and type quickly and get used to doing
 nothing for an hour or two. That's what searching on the
 Web is sort of like."
         As you read this article, Mirksy is probably at
 it now, typing away on his Macintosh LC III, listening
 to some Duke Ellington. 
      "It's hard to know what's the best use of my time
 now. There are certain subjects that I haven't even
 explored. Someone asked me whether I did anything on
 financial pages. I started trying to look at some, but
 they are so boring. But the searching, I like the
 searching. It's satisfying when I find something no one
 else has found and it's really bad."

Mediocre Site of the Day
http://pantheon.cis.yale.edu/~jharris

Only a finite number of Web sites that can truly
 be deemed "cool" or conversely "useless." So what of
 those simply average Web sites that neither excite
 or repulse -- that middle 98 percent that Nixon might
 have dubbed "the Web's silent majority?" Those sites
 fall into the territory of Jensen Harris, a 19-year-old
 sophomore majoring in music at Yale University,  the
 Web's official judge on mediocrity. Since its launch
 last April, Harris' "Mediocre Site of the Day" has
 steadily built a following. Harris estimates his page
 attracts 600 to 800 visitors a day.
      "I figured mediocrity could be something the Amer-
 ican mainstream would tend to identify with," Harris
 said. He spends about an hour a day on the 'net in his
 cluttered residence hall bedroom. "I tend to organize
 vertically in piles," Harris says of his workspace
 which doubles as a music studio. "I'm messy, but it's
 not like I have tacos on the keyboard." Computers are
 just a hobby for Harris, who aspires to be a composer,
 conductor and music teacher.
       Finding mediocrity is hardly a science. Harris
 receives between 25 to 30 suggestions per day, but
 generally finds sites himself by typing random words
 into search engines and seeing where it leads.
       Harris said most people don't seem to mind having
 their sites deemed mediocre, but he admits he's more
 choosy now about whom he sends official notifications.
 Once he picked a natural underwater child birth site.
 The site's creator promptly e-mailed Harris back,
 calling him the "insensitive male of the day."With the
 growth of the web, Harris says he doesn't feel like
 he's in a competition with other web arbiters.
 "There's no shortage of mediocrity out there," he said.
       Harris enjoys his work as the gatekeeper of the
 so-so and the notoriety that comes with it. He vows he
 will continue to highlight mediocrity as long as the
 interest is there. Judging by sales of the latest
 Michael Bolton CD, Harris should be at it for some
 time.

The Point
http://www.pointcom.com

Frequent surfers will recognize the symbol
 from one of the largest arbiters of cool, the Point.
 The Portland, Ore., company selects, on an admittedly
 subjective basis, the Top 5% of Web sites.  The Point,
 which receives upwards of 200,000 hits a day, employs
 a full-time staff whose mission in life is to scour
 the Web for sites worthy of mention.  Compiling
 selections from 15 employees obviously leads to great
 variation in what's deemed cool. Though the Point
 doesn't rate porno sites, just about everything else
 is fair game. The final say comes from editor Ryan
 Holznagel, a former scriptwriter who strongly believes
 that coolness on the Web is determined not by outside
 arbiters, but by the unique visions of page designers.   
       "It would be hard to be an arbiter of cool on the
 Web," explained Holznagel, "since one of the key plea-
 sures for most users is being the admiral of their own
 expedition.  What we try to do is point out interesting
 ports of call." Holznagel considers his background "ap-
 propriately eclectic" for the kind of work into which
 he's fallen.  Having first learned BASIC in 1978 on a
 Commodore Pet, Holznagel gave up programming to
 study history at Willamette University in Oregon, then
 moved on to work in film and video.  After a stint as
 story supervisor for the Saturday morning "California
 Raisin Show," Holznagel won a 1992 Emmy for scripting
 "A Claymation Easter."  Though the gritty world of
 children's pro- gramming continued to beckon,
 Holznagel decided to move onto greener, or at least
 less trodden, pastures:  multimedia and computers.
      "The Web is perhaps the most individual and per-
 sonal mass medium we have right now and the best sites
 generate a unique tone, a unique world."  The Point
 rates not only commercial sites but personal home
 pages as well, selecting on the grounds of content,
 presentation and experience, similar to a restaurant
 guide's ratings on food, decor and service.  Holznagel
 tries to look beyond the initial graphical impression
 for a deeper, more individual flavor.  "Complicated
 or fancy isn't necessarily better.  I like the feeling
 that I'm hearing from a strong, clear voice."
      Having a base in Oregon has its advantages. 
 After spending ten hours on the Web, Holznagel can
 simply poke his head out of his Union Station office
 window to watch antique trains roll by or simply escape
 to "the forests, rain and physical reality" nearby.
 A decade spent around entertainment and computers
 offered  Holznagel a sense of self-awareness about his
 job; most of the staid, egotistic seriousness of many
 Web arbiters seems missing from Holznagel's persona.
  He even speaks with humor about the effect of the
 Point on his social life: "Whenever I'm on a date
 now, just about every single topic of conversation
 makes me want to say, ëYou know, that reminds me of
 something I just saw on the Web...' I think that gets
 old after a while -- for my dates, anyway."

Geek Site of the Day
http://riceinfo.rice.edu/~indigo/gsotd

It's only natural.  After all, the 'net was
 set up by all those Defense Department and scientific
 types.  So there plenty of sites devoted to polyhedrons,
 ham radio, prime numbers, Atari systems, slide rules
 and radiation experiments.  They're all sniffed out
 by Scott Ruthfield, a junior in computer science at
 Rice University in Houston. Ruthfield maintains "Geek
 Site of the Day" purely for his own pleasure and that
 of other geeks, a surprisingly large and loyal fol-
 lowing of folk amused by Hewlett-Packard calculators,
 Scooby-Doo, and ASCII art.  
      Ruthfield has set no firm criteria for what makes
 a site properly geeky. He resists rules in general. 
 "I'd be tempted to break 'em." He feels that people
 who judge and present cool sites too often claim respon-
 sibility for the quality of the Web.  Scott feels that
 they only provide a service. The people who put up
 content are the real heroes.
       Scott tries to get all the sites for a week done
 in one session, when he surfs on his personal computer,
 a 486 66mHz.. Scott receives five to ten emails every
 day.  They fall into two camps, people trying to sell
 things to him and letters complimenting the site and
 nominating other geek sites.
      Reflecting upon the growing popularity of nerds,
 Scott said, "Geekiness is a cool little trend, in the
 same way that roller derby was trendy; most people
 find it interesting to gawk at but would never actually
 want to participate."
     "Although I don't have a monopoly on defining it,
 I think I must classify myself as a geek."  He thinks
 that it's tricky to classify what is geeky, since the
 word has become a kind of compliment. We asked Scott
 if he wore tape-mended eyeglasses, but he has perfect
 vision, boldly shattering a pervasive geek stereotype.
 He wears raggedy t-shirts and shorts for the most part,
 and 90 percent of what he wears is Rice-oriented, "You
 know, like Rice blood drive shirts.  That's the only
 reason to give blood, isn't it?  To get the shirt?"   
      Ruthfield files by the "pile system," and friends
 using his computer are warned not to disturb the tower-
 ing stacks of paper. The rest of his room is littered 
 with stuff such as mementos from debate trips around the
 world, a plastic crab stolen from a hotel in retribution
 for a particularly bad breakfast, and a "cool chair
 which looks like it was ripped out of an airplane, but
 it wasn't.  We don't know where it came from.  It leans
 all the way back and kind of rocks back and forth."
      His roommate previously won an award for "cleanest
 room of the year"; Scott chuckles, "Then he got stuck
 with me."

Useless Site of the Day
http://www.primus.com/staff/paulp/useless.html

There's no shortage of sites on the Web that
 seemingly serve no purpose. This axiom is evident to
 anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes on the Net,
 but it took Paul Phillips to corral all those pur-
 poseless sites into the aptly titled Useless Pages.
     It all started when Phillips, a 23-year-old student
 at the University of California at San Diego and self-
 confessed "computer nerd," was doing some late night
 surfing and he stumbled upon someone's CD collection.
 Phillips at the time was working for Primus, an Internet
 technology services company. When he posted his find-
 ing on a usenet group, others instantly barraged him
 with pointers to other sites that were just as, well,
 useless. "I discovered a whole undercurrent of desire
 to point this kind of thing out," Phillips said. 
     The site took off, but all that banality took a toll.
 Last spring, Phillips' enthusiasm lagged. "I just got so
 useless-est out" said Phillips, who was getting more
 than 100 suggestions a day. 
     One of those suggestions was from Steve Berlin, a
 longtime fan of the Useless Pages, who at the time was
 working in an office that he described as a "virtual
 Dilbert strip." Berlin, whose T-shirt collection was one
 of Phillips' first useless sites, noticed the pages had
 not been updated recently. He e-mailed Phillips an
 volunteered to take over, an offer Phillips gladly 
 accepted. 
      Although the site may be called "Useless" it's
 been anything but for Berlin, a 33-year-old Bay Area
 resident who parlayed his quest for the vain into a
 full-time job at Yahoo. Checking out newly submitted
 sites for a living helps Berlin find plenty of useless
 sites. He also surfs for over an hour a day in a clut-
 tered work space just outside San Francisco.
      Both Phillips and Berlin said that most people
 enjoy having their sites included on the Useless Pages.
 Phillips said the only person who ever got upset was a
 guy who published an entire site in Gaelic, who pointed
 out he had a right to publish a site in his own native
 tongue on the World Wide Web. 
      Phillips hasn't completely forsaken his page,
 checking in from time to time as a "Useless Emeritus."
 For now, his agenda is filled with more purposeful
 pursuits like designing Boa, his own Web browser, and
 writing a game for Java.