Steve McInnis

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Since starting WOTW back in the halcyon days of January 1995, Mirsky's kept a level head about his Web venture. In fact, the only thing that could prevent him from turning a profit, the only thing that could get in the way of publishing a WOTW book, is the fact that he's getting really sick of it all. -- Carrie McLaren

Carrie McLaren: You were saying you don't like to do interviews, that you'd rather have people figure out what you think about the Web on their own. But basically WOTW is a list of unnamed links. So how do you think most people would form their opinion?

Mirsky: By the links and the commentary. I think talking too directly will take away from the tone of my page. I'd rather play with expectations. The Web is full of people willing to tell everyone their life story. I want "Mirsky" to be the antithesis of that.

But one of the most peculiar things about the Web is how difficult it is to put something in context. You can spend more time trying to figure out where someone's coming from than what they're actually saying. Of course, other than hiring someone to think for you, I guess there's no other way of going about it.

Well, most people putting up pages don't take the time to give thoughtful opinions. People think that listing what is cool is enough. I think that's partly due to the fact that the Web is new and when you initially use it, it's exciting. A bigger reason is that writing a Web page is really easy and lots of people who have nothing to say are saying it.

Have you heard from the Hall of Shame or the Useless Pages guy lately?

The Useless Pages guy, Steve Berlin, reads The Hall of Shame and sometimes emails me about it. For example, the Hall of Shame guy picked Worst of the Web after I changed my main page's background color to yellow. The Hall of Shame guy said I was copying him by choosing yellow because his pages were once yellow, though they had been since switched to white.

I also heard from The Hall of Shame Guy after I picked four pages with a lot of hostility. One page was the lyrics to a song by some guy called "Get Off My Ass" in which he calls his girlfriend a bitch and tells her she will be "swimming in the shit" soon. Another page simply said: "I Hate the Internet." Another was a poem in which a guy said "Fuck You" to all his former co-workers. The last page displayed a bunch of colors then said "Fuck You!!!" and then repeated itself. My comment for all four was: "Shut the hell up you stupid bastards!!!" The Hall of Shame guy wrote me a letter saying that I was copying him.

Wow, that's great. Do you get asked what criteria you use to decide what's worse a lot?

Yeah. I purposely don't list criteria. I want people to feel that there is some risk to putting up a Web page, assuming they don't want to get picked by me.

Do some people actually WANT to be picked?

People will e-mail me and say they have a really shitty site that deserves being on WOTW. Often it's true. But often the page is called something like "This Page Sucks" or "Joe's Crappy Home Page." In general, I won't pick someone's page if I know they want me to. I don't want to reward people, I want to embarrass them.

I can't think of many examples of that happening in other media. Well, Spin has a worst band contest. And a local comedy club here has "experimental" comedy night, where to some of the comedians, "experimental" must mean being really bad... or parodying being really bad.

Yeah. The Gong Show used to have an award for the worst act. I think that's what drove it off of the air. I remember once seeing an "Act" where a few guys brushed their teeth and spit in a cup and the last guy drank it. I can't remember if they won or not.

The Web is king of that, though. There's so much crap, it's hard to tell parodies from what they're parody-ing.

Definitely. Occasionally, I'll pick a page that I think is genuine and later find out it's a joke. There is a site called helpscott.com where a kid named Scott basically is asking for money to buy, among other things, a car, a computer and a protective vest. The guy is either a total idiot or the reincarnation of Andy Kaufman.

It seems like there's an insane amount of parody on the Web. Or maybe that's just me.

Well, writing a Web page doesn't cost anything. It's cheaper than any other media. I haven't noticed that many parodies, though, but maybe it's because I don't look for them. Although, I think a lot of pages are unintentional parodies of the people who write them. Or maybe they aren't.

On the staff page of our Web site, I linked to the Ferndale soap opera, where this woman Carrie had all these lesions on her face, medical problems, etc. I thought it was a real riot and that Ferndale was a regular Web soap, then I read somewhere that it's actually a parody.

The fact that they call it a parody doesn't mean it is one, though. I talked to one of the guys who started The Spot on the phone a while back. He said that The Spot is a comedy.

What I like about WOTW is that you don't just point out crappy layout, boring subjects or whatever. You seem to be more about exploring clashing world views. It's sort of like going to a really big news stand where there are magazines about everything. You're not just like "oh, there's a maga-zine about breeding ferrets. ha ha." It's more about what people who breed ferrets think about, their perspectives on animal smells, pets in cars, etc.

Yeah, to me what's funniest is the thinking behind the pages.

Are you familiar with zines and "indie culture"?

Nope, not at all.

Which is worse: print-influenced Web sites or Web-influenced print?

Web-influenced print is pretty bad, but I think that print-influenced Web is worse. One big problem is the whole notion of the Web "page." Pages, in print, are linear. You flip from one to the other. One thing about computers is that you can manipulate, present and retrieve data in an non-linear way. A lot of people and companies took the notion of "page" too literally.

But at least with text-based Web sites you can print stuff out and it works.

Yeah. Text still is the most important part of Web pages. You could do without graphics, Java, etc. and still have something worthwhile.

Do you think the most important criticisms of the Web are because of the content (which could be remedied with something like better graphics or text) or something more deep-seated, something relating to the medium itself. Like the fact that it discourages having much of an attention span.

I think the most important criticism is that of the content. You don't have to jump. There are plenty of sites with information that you could spend hours reading. The fact that you can easily move from one place to another is part of what is special about the Web.

But don't you think reading on the Web is hard on the eyes? Yeah, you CAN spend hours reading, just like you COULD spend hours watching talking heads on TV, but the Web isn't best for reading a lot, just like good TV isn't watching people talk. Do you read any Neil Postman? He says that what makes for good TV (bold visual imagery, clear narratives) makes it a bad source for education and news. He says television is good BECAUSE of the junk (entertainment, in other words), not in spite of it.

I'm not familiar with Postman but I definitely disagree that TV is just good for junk. What about C-SPAN? What about the longer discussions on "The Lehrer News Hour"? It's how the medium is used, not its inherent capabilities.

Yeah, but different media are better for different things. TV is supposed to be visual so a good TV news show has guns, fires, crack babies, etc. C-SPAN is just talking. In a way, it's like text-heavy Web sites, which doesn't necessarily mean it sucks. (blah, blah, blah, we go on about this but my co-worker started booing)... What does the Web do best? What's an example of a great Web site, something that couldn't be done in another medium?

A Web search engine, as dull as that may sound. I think, right now, the Web is best as an information source.

Dull, no way! What do you think is the worst Web genre?

The personal home page. Having one is now practically a rite of passage in having an internet account. They are mostly uninteresting and practically all the same. They aren't even that personal. What especially kills me is when someone addresses the reader as if the reader has never used the Web before and that the page will be a guide for him/her. It's a nice gesture, but it's also indicative of someone whose world revolves around themselves.