Original Rationale

Original Rationale
The thought that launched a thousand links

Why does this site exist?

What gift do you get for the person who has everything? Theoretically, few of us are ever faced with people who have everything they might want or need. The recent release of the now shrinking Forbes Billionaire list (clearly designed for the terminally envious or nosey) demonstrates that such people probably do exist, even if in decreasing numbers. But how many of us have to send them gifts?

Yet the popularity of stores such as The Sharper Image and Illuminations demonstrate that companies can build comercially viable enterprises from selling the kind of stuff you only give people when you've run out of real gift ideas. If you ever receive an electronic chess set made out of marble, or a guacamole and pesto scented candle from your friends, I strongly suggest cancelling future vacations until you can upgrade your personality so they can actually work out what to get you. Or, simpler, just get yourself a wishlist at a site that actually sells stuff you want, or a site that sells stuff everyone wants.

Faced with the prospect of creating my first public web page in the year 2002, I feel just like the friend who doesn't know what gift to get. What can you get for the Internet that it hasn't gotten already? I mean, sure, the Internet and I have been friends for ages. The Internet's great fun to be around. A total riot at parties. And some of the stories I could tell you about when we were in college together! Phew. We first met during the late 80s, but it wasn't until the early 90s that the Internet started giving me stuff. And now, at the start of 2002, there's more stuff here than anyone or anything can get their head around. And people have so totally run out of ideas for new stuff to put out there, that they now simply log what happened in their day. Of course, this is more interesting in some cases than in others.

I have made several previous abortive attempts to expose myself on the web (fnarr, fnarr). I am unable to track down good records, but I first had server space of my own in 1996, and I appear to have tried to create a personal website in early 1997, just after finishing my first project at Microsoft. This was one year after I had moved to America to work at MS, around the time I started thinking seriously that I'd better start dating again! I think I thought I'd present myself on the web and maybe meet people that way. Luckily, this idea bit the dust before it was ever uploaded onto a web server. I even managed to date people without a personal web presence. Extraordinary!

A similar fate befell my other personal sites (created for other reasons). The one that has survived clearly shows my increasing desperation in trying to find something to write about that isn't alread on the internet. Movie Clusters was about a subject that has fascinated me on and off - Hollywood's tendency to highly similar movies within 12 months of each other. Armageddon and Deep Impact are a great example of this. And this is one of a vanishingly small set of things about movies that the Internet Movie Database does not track. So this site is visible, although it currently only tracks one pair. Perhaps I will get back to it later :).

In early 2001, I became aware of something that had gotten lost from my usage of the Internet. When the WWW first got started, there were lots of good sites with links to interesting new content. Some of the best of these were editorially reviewed, and really gave you a chance to see new and interesting stuff. As the web grew larger, this task became impractical. There was way too much new stuff, and too much bad stuff that wanted to pay to have good placement. The net result was that new sites would arise and I wouldn't hear about them until way too late. A further problem was that when I did hear about something new and cool, I'd fail to put it into my favourites, and it would be lost for ever.

So I vowed to fix this. I spent a few evenings looking around for good links, checking back on archives of stuff I had been sent, on the Webby archives, and other places. I started to collect a list of places that I thought were interesting in my IE favourites list.

I'm now publishing this list to the web. It is in no way complete or definitive. Neither of these are goals. There are plenty of search and listings sites already. It is a list of stuff I find useful or cool or interesting or surprising or funny or wierd or both. I hope you will find some of the stuff useful too.