Fellowship of the Rings: An Introduction

Dateline: 04/12/97

Of the many signs of disrespect directed at personal pages, the most frustrating is the navigational oblivion to which they are so often assigned. The major search engines and directories do a very poor job of helping Web users find personal pages; most even fail to treat them as a separate category. Email newsletters and discussion lists where creators of personal pages congregate bubble over with the frustration of those unable to get their pages listed in a mainstream directory.

I say, the heck with all that.

There's another approach to exploring the personal-page phenomenon, one developed by the creators themselves. You can think of it as a separate navigational system just for the "Undernet": a novel, decentralized, and soothingly non-hierarchical way to experience and organize Web content that's ideal for personal pages. Indeed, it's downright circular: Webrings.

Simply, a Webring is a group of sites linked in an organized way to create something like a guided tour. The concept is quite literal. The sites share a common navigation system so that when you've clicked through them all you're back where you started. But it's not as controlled as all that. You can enter the Ring at any point, travel it in any direction, list its next five sites, jump to a random one, or get a list of all the pages in the loop.

Although a chap in Great Britain is credited with the concept, the Web's current Ring Leader is Webring at mind.net, where the resident sage is Sage Weil. The search/directory sites haven't nearly caught up with the proliferation of Rings. A search of Yahoo reveals some 50 in its directory, whereas Webring's index -- a great place to start any exploration of the Web, I might add -- lists 1,340 out of a total of more than 7,700 created under its auspices. The single largest category, with about 200 Rings, is personal pages.

Rings tend to be manageable in size: 20 or so sites is the norm, though some include more than 100. Each has its own ground rules and at least one person fulfills the role of "maintainer" to clear new entrants and such. But in all, there's a sense of community. Take the Open Pages ring, which says it's for "netizens who keep web journals and diaries, daily ramblings and sporadic babblings." It has pretty strict rules about updating and archiving -- this smoothing is a major reason why Rings are perhaps the best way to experience personal pages -- yet it boasts more than 80 members.

Webrings, along with guestbooks and the countless awards personal pages bestow on one another, are the somewhat ironic ways creators garner the attention and recognition they are denied elsewhere on the Net. And they're darn fun, too.