-by Fish

While the World Wide Web might have been around since 1990, it didn't really explode until about five years later. Suddenly, everyone had to not only have an email address, but a home page as well. Suddenly, folks with no real programming experience dove headfirst into

tags, slapping together something serviceable because it was important to stake your ground in "cyberspace". Suddenly, everyone had a home page using this formula:

• a grainy 320x200 photo of you
• an unnecessary greeting ("Hi! My name is John Doe, and welcome to my home page on the World Wide Web!!!")
• a paragraph explaining where you go to school and/or where you work (said paragraph should run the full width of the browser window, so that it's really hard to read)
• a paragraph mentioning your hobbies (ditto)
• a short list of links, of which half are typically humor sites
• gaudy or grainy clip art lifted from another site

I don't miss those days -- the rainbow-colored page dividers, the blinking text, the erratic font sizes, the black-on-grey screens. But I do miss home pages.

Once the initial excitement wore off, most home pages began gathering virtual dust. Untended, their information became increasingly inaccurate. College graduates' pages boasted of what school they still allegedly attended; everyone expressed their love of sites like Mirsky's Worst of the Web long after they (sadly) vanished. It wasn't much longer before colleges yanked their alums' accounts or people changed ISPs, and their once-ambitious home pages became only memories. And broken links.

The blogging wave brought many of these folks back to the habit of contributing to the Web. When I started my blog in 2001, I called it a "Web journal" (the phrase "blog" not yet commonplace), and in my first few posts felt I had to justify the seeming hubris of rattling on about my day-to-day to the world at large. Not so nowadays, when many social groups, especially younger ones, instead ask their members to socially justify not having a blog. I've known many people whose first blog post explains how they've "finally caved" and that they don't expect to actually update very often. (Most all of them, contrary to their own expectations, soon get caught up in the benign narcissism of blogging after a few weeks.)

A blog, though, isn't the same as a home page; many of the features I'd come to expect from a home page just aren't there. And for good reason: the blogging software folks have centered their features around, well, blogging, and not being your virtual home. Many blogs offer an "About Me" page and some photo library features, but ultimately your blog site is first and foremost about displaying your latest rambling blog post. Similarly, the photo sites like Flickr offer some echoes of the old home page, but they're focused on their main attraction se, pictures. Flickr lets you give a short profile about yourself, but that's about it.

The closest thing we've got, ironically, are the social networking sites. Originally just a way to post a short bio in order to describe yourself to the people you hoped to meet, MySpace (and now Friendster) let anyone see your profile, whether they're a registered user or not. In that sense, they're a kind of home page. But while the social networking sites let you post photos, they don't allow many, and they're at a poor resolution. They have built-in blogging, but that's not an especially popular option, since the sites dedicated to blogging offer better blogging features. Even so, millions of teenagers use their MySpace page the way their predecessors used home pages a decade before, as their central representation of themselves online. The 2006 MySpace pages look better than the 1996 home pages (well, sort of; teenagers' MySpace pages tend to be cluttered, noisy messes instead of spare, bland snoozers), and MySpace offers page templates so that people don't have to learn HTML. But those templates also limit how much their users can customize the pages, so most MySpace pages follow the same basic theme. If these are home pages, they're pre-fab homes. They're Quonset huts with embedded XML players and pictures of drunk guys in baseball hats.

So nowadays, instead of friends with home pages, I've got friends with a blog on one site, a social networking bio on another, and a bunch of photos on a third. None of their sites have links to the others. Worse yet, my friends often use different user IDs on each of the sites, making it hard to remember who's who. For every person I know who's "janedoe" everywhere, there are three others who are "MelissaN" at one site, "LissaN" on another, "MelissaN3" on a third. People don't have a Web identity; they have many. People don't have a Web home; they have a diaspora.

That's why I still have a home page. I don't update it more than once or twice a year, sure, and it's largely just a way to link to stuff I'm involved with, but it's me. It's a central place to find me. Be it ever so humble, there's no place like it.