Web users fall into one of two camps, and the tip-off is always their bookmarks.
The first set of users are utilitarian and their bookmarks take them straight to useful Internet destinations. Their bookmarks might, for instance, include their online banking, company website, e-mail, stock-watching sites and favourite newspaper -- all of which are very handy.
In the second camp are surfers who aren't so concerned with handiness. Instead, when they fire up their browsers, their bookmarks take them not to sites that do things, but to sites that link to other sites, connecting them with the best of what's going on online.
I have a suspicion that at least some of the people in the first camp are quietly curious about the second. They might hear about interesting things on the Web, but their start page at MSN.ca only ever seems to produces headlines like Mulroney on Oscar nominations, which doesn't make the World Wide Web seem like a very good invention at all.
What they need, in this situation, is a good aggregator -- a site that pulls headlines from other sites, and matches your tastes. Some are automatic, some are human-powered, but they'll all connect you with online culture -- such as it is. Here are four good ones to start with:
Boing Boing
Twice voted the best blog on the Web, Boing Boing offers up a trail mix of technology culture and whimsy: retro art, digital copyright issues, ear-wax removal techniques, electronic voting problems, unicorn pictures. It's run by four accomplished writers, including Cory Doctorow, an expatriate Torontonian who keeps the site stocked with a supply of Canadian content. It's a good place to go to catch wind of ongoing issues (especially privacy and intellectual property debates) and new ideas simmering on the Web.
What's most surprising about Boing Boing is that, as a hub of on-line culture, it's so decidedly traditional in its approach. In an age when just about every other website is allowing readers to post comments on anything, Boing Boing allows no comments at all. If readers want to suggest a link, they're asked to kindly send a note to the editors using a little form. The editors read their mail, and quote from it liberally, but it's their show. It's almost like a newspaper. How quaint!
MetaFilter
MetaFilter (http://www.metafilter.org) is a site where community members hunt for "the best of the Web," and usually turn up nothing of the sort. It is, however, one of the most entertaining ways of staying on top of what's out there.
The site is an open weblog where anybody can post items linking to interesting places around the Web. The MetaFilter ideal is for contributors to point to multiple websites in each blog entry they post. So you'll find postings that will link to three different Oscar nominees for Best Animated Short, hosted on different video-clip websites, or to pages on "eefing," a "100-plus-year-old vocal technique from rural Tennessee" in which the vocalist makes an astounding variety of farting and wheezing noises. (The audio-visual links from that one were something.) Tastes on MetaFilter run toward the liberal and eclectic; commentary on everything abounds.
Anyone can read the site, but before they can contribute, they have to pay a one-time $5 (U.S.) membership fee, which helps weed out the no-goodniks. The site's moderators keep a tight rein on self-promotion and weed out duplicate and nonsense posts. The result is an exceedingly snarky community of users who alternate between being very excited about engaging posts and very catty about dull ones.
Digg
Launched in 2005 (decades ago in Internet years), Digg, for a time, was lauded as an ideal democratic model for all media. It works by asking its members to submit links to stories they like from around the Web. Then, members browsing Digg.com vote on the stories they like. Stories that garner the most "diggs" (as it were) rise to the front page of the site, where, thanks to the Digg's massive readership, huge numbers of people will see them.
The concept has proved a wild success. According to one count, Digg has spawned more than 50 imitators so far, including the new Netscape.com. The upside of Digg? It's a democratic crowd-pleaser. The downside? It's a democratic crowd-pleaser. As of this writing, the top story concerns compromising photos of a female executive. If it's not lowbrow, it tends toward the lightweight (not that I didn't enjoy the item on the "cat-washing machine"). The wisdom of crowds has always been a bit iffy. They cover a lot of ground, yes, but discernment was never a strong point.
Popurls
Finally, you could decide that you prefer quantity over quality. Enter Popurls, a faintly insane site that takes all of the headlines from all of the Internet's top news aggregators, and aggregates them. The result is a long page that lists the top 18 stories on 18 of the top aggregators on the Internet, including Digg, MetaFilter, Boing Boing, and 15 of their aggregating peers, as well as sound, image, and video sites like YouTube and Flickr.
Popurls is no marvel of technology -- other automatic aggregators, like Google News (news.google.com) and the newer, buzz-tracking TailRank (http://www.tailrank.com), do more to make sense of all this information. But Popurls has a simple advantage: By laying out the headlines in a giant spread, you can see the ones that repeat on site after site, as word of the latest trend or joke or shark video spreads. Vast as the Internet seems, its news organs can digest only a finite number of stories at a time. It's oddly comforting: The Web is big enough to lose yourself in, but small enough to get your head around -- if you're willing to surf.
