The Year In Homepages: Part I

Dateline: 12/29/97 - Weekly feature from your Guide to Personal Web Pages.

The tide may be turning. When the mainstream directory site NetGuide recently pinpointed the rise of the "ultra personal" page as one of the best trends of the year, it was recognition long overdue.

1997 was a year when personal expression on the Web flowered, even while certain negative trends, such as domain discrimination, were taken to new extremes. Statistically speaking, homepages continued to appear at a phenomenal rate. Established free-webspace providers such as GeoCities and Tripod went off the charts, finishing up the year at 1.2 million and 750,000 homepages, respectively.

Here's my look at 1997 in the world of personal homepages. Year-end roundups tend to have a sort of forced, instant-nostalgia feeling to them. But I'll do my best to make this fun and informative. This week's article looks at trends and individual sites in some very idiosyncratic categories. Next week comes the heavy-lifting: My choices for the best individual homepages in generic categories such as diaries and soapboxes.

Most Inspirational Site

Steve Schalchin's Survival Site
This journal tells the story of a singer/songwriter battling AIDS who this year saw his musical, The Last Session, open Off-Broadway to widespread acclaim.

Best Title Change

Maggy Donea's morphs Maggy's World into the much acclaimed Water, a title that evokes a flowing, life-sustaining, ubiquitous quality. Indeed, this is a site where visitors feel submerged.

Most Confusing

Awaken, With Chick Jesus
The archives of Julie Petersen's Awaken are among the most influential documents in the homepage universe, but in 1997 Julie all but disappeared. She dallied briefly with a new incarnation called Chick Jesus, then incorporated that experiment into Awaken, posted an apology-that-was-not-really-an-apology for not updating for months, and then still didn't post new material after the non-apology. Julie, we miss you.

Most Persistent

Bagism
Despite hounding from the estate of John Lennon (well-documented here), Sam Choukri persists in offering this Lennon site, a superior and intelligent fan page.

Best Trend

Webrings
I know, I know, Webrings are nothing new and quite a few people have soured on them following the sale of Webring.org to a commercial software firm. Still, they're the closest we've got to an alternative navigation system - a fun, non-hierarchical, homepager-centered universe that most Net surfers still don't know anything about. Here's hoping that changes in 1998.

Worst Trend, I

Domain Discrimination
In 1997, some search engines periodically blocked entire domains - including GeoCities and Angelfire - from using their Add-URL functions because of the spam problem. South Korea denied its people access to all GeoCities' sites because of a single personal page that lauded North Korea. The Censorware Project uncovered that Cyber Patrol's filtering software blocks the entire Tripod domain.

Homepagers now need to consider whether choosing a free webspace provider relegates them to the category of second-class Netizens. That's very sad.

Worst Trend, II

Diana Memorials
Most of the memorials to the late Princess were slapdash affairs with too little heart and too much hype (it was particularly sickening how many commercial entities registered "dianadead.com"-type domains to capitalize on the Web frenzy). I preferred the personal sites that tried to take action to address perceived wrongs or that engaged people in dialogue. This was the Web somewhat at its best, but mostly at its worst.

Go to Part II.