Each was tagged with a comment from Berlin, using the tone and semiotics that came to define the early web a blend of sarcastic detachment, pop culture reference, and a genuine interest in the mundane. Glenn Davis’ “Cool Site of the Day” had a similar vibe and tone of the Useless Pagesīy the second half of the 1990’s, Berlin had become something of an expert web surfer.Īnd through it all, he contributed hundreds and hundreds of new sites to the always-evolving Useless Pages. On top of that, Berlin contributed a bi-monthly column to Websight magazine, alongside fellow columnist and cool site collector Glenn Davis, with more interesting web finds. His web surfing career continued not long after he started maintaining The Useless Pages, when Berlin got hired as Yahoo!’s first full-time web surfer (under the direction of Srinija Srinivasan) in 1995, digging up sites of the more targeted variety and cataloging them in the Yahoo! directory. Berlin accepted, and began to put together a new iteration of Useless Pages, one filled with the same kind of banal niche websites, but with more regularity and a consistent voice. So, in 1995, Phillips offered to let him run it instead. He knew the useful stuff too, but he reveled in the useless.Įarly on in Useless Pages history, Berlin would email Phillips with lots of recommendations. He knew where you could find a fan page dedicated to sporks or a page that listed out all the stuff in some guys’ room. By the time Phillips launched The Useless Pages, Berlin was already versed in some of the web’s more obscure corners. It wasn’t until Steve Berlin took over that the Useless Pages got its full shape.īerlin came to the web early, in the early ’90’s when a friend from college opened up a browser and showed him the web. Through his contact info listed on the site, people were submitting all kinds of useless sites ( a look at the earliest sites listed includes a digital vacuum cleaner museum, a catalog of Dutch traffic signs, and a list simply known as “Things Michel like to consume”), but Phillips was unable to keep up. Phillips continued to add new sites, but it was inconsistent and uneven. Within a year, it was reaching tens of thousands of hits a month, which at the time, was a significant portion of all web users. The list continued to grow, and spread, across the web. There wasn’t much rhyme or reason to the list, one site didn’t connect to the other. He’d post a link to a page, and leave a brief comment on it. One by one, Phillips began to add to the list of useless websites. At first, he called it, America’s Funniest Home Hypermedia, but soon changed it to the much more enduring Useless Pages. He created his own webpage with a list of websites common only in how useless their premise was. “Its utility was nil, its style banal, its content embarrassing, its unintentional humor value high.” Phillips was nevertheless intrigued that someone would create a website seemingly only for themselves-and equally fascinated by how much time he spent on it. Paul Phillips once described one of these websites-Kenny Z’s CD List-which he first stumbled upon in 1994. For every website on the top 100 list that you come across on a daily basis, there are hundreds of thousands of websites with far less attention serving some small, niche purpose. It’s nearly impossible to get an accurate count, but by some estimates, there are over a billion websites (maybe close to two billion). And the differences are profound.” That’s what he called the Long Tail.īut the Long Tail applies to content on the web more generally. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced,” Anderson argued, continuing, “This is the world of scarcity. “Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. In it, Anderson argued that the widespread and limitless distribution potential of the Internet made it possible to commoditize and make a profit from niche, small-market products with much smaller audiences than mainstream, brick and mortar retailers. It was written by technologist and TED founder Chris Anderson. Seen from the right angle, it’s true now as well.Ī decade after that article came out, another article was published in Wired entitled “The Long Tail.”. “There’s a staggering amount of uselessness all over the Web,” read one article from Wired from 1996. In the beginning, the web was going to do, well, nothing at all really. He built his own useless site to catalog it. When Paul Phillips the web is at its best when its being useless he did the only thing he could think of.
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