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




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




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




The Point
http://www.pointcom.com




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




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


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