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*                                                            *
*                         CYBERSPACE                         *
*         A biweekly column on net culture appearing         *
*                in the Toronto Sunday Sun                   *
*                                                            *
* Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer                                  *
* Free for online distribution                               *
* All Rights Reserved                                        *
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I like to compare the web to a 50 million volume library that 
houses its collection in one huge pile, leaving it up to 
patrons to figure how to find needed material. Indexes like 
Yahoo! (www.yahoo.ca) have helped bring organization to this 
huge, chaotic store of information but you still have to slog 
through a farrago of crud to find a page that reminds you why 
you're paying for net connectivity.

About the same time Yahoo! started taking off, Norfolk, VA 
resident Glenn Davis got the idea of helping web surfers find 
the good stuff by directing them each day to a cool site. The 
"Cool Site of the Day" page (cool.infi.net) went online in 1994 
and soon spawned numerous imitators.

Netizens generally know when to back off and let someone run 
with a good idea, but after many users got over the shock that 
someone could actually devote himself to the net on a daily 
basis, they started paying attention to what sites were being 
picked. It became apparent that "cool" was a matter of taste 
and there was room for improvement.

Given the form's popularity, it's only a matter of time before 
someone starts a Cool "Cool Site of the Day" of the Day page. 
My first pick would be the Geek Site of the Day 
(www.owlnet.rice.edu/~indigo/gsotd/). A big, evil corporation 
can throw lots of money at a site but nothing can match a 
brilliant, disenchanted student skipping classes to develop a 
freaky page.

My second pick would be Mirsky's Worst of the Web 
(mirsky.com/wow/). Unfortunately, he stopped adding sites back 
in November. It's a tragic loss but you can still read what's 
there. Mirsky, a virtual truffle pig, had the uncanny ability 
to sniff out pages a couple clicks deep that were so odious to 
one's sense of intellectual propriety that they had to be 
celebrated.

Although I can't recommend it because it spikes the frat boy 
humor meter once too often, an ongoing worst of the web page 
can be found at www.worstoftheweb.com. I do recommend the Tres 
Bizarre site of the day (ucunix.san.uc.edu/~solkode/tres_bizar) 
even though the creator doesn't bother to explain why he finds 
the sites bizarre. But most don't need justification. For 
example, there's a page that shows users how to launch peaches 
with liquid nitrogen.

Canadians are no slouches when it comes to building sites or 
celebrating made-in-Canada pages. Yahoo! Canada publishes a 
respectable list of picks for the week at www.yahoo.ca/picks/. 
The Cool Canadian Site of the Day at web.idirect.com/~canadian 
honors remarkable pages. To toot my own html, since 1995 I've 
been developing a site at www.netizen.org/awards that bestows a 
daily Good Netizen Seal of Approval on Canadian pages offering 
outstanding content.

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