Deliver Us from Home-Page Hell

"Have you seen my Web page?" "Check out my URL." "Forget a business card; let me give you my Web card." Undoubtedly, you've heard one or all of the above, but have you actually bothered to check out their site? It's likely to be poorly designed, gratuitously self-absorbed, and filled with typos.

Trust us, we know. We strapped our intrepid reporter Lefty Periwinkle at a computer, propped his eyes open a la "A Clockwork Orange," and made him spend a few days wading through the Seventh Ring of Hell of personal Web pages, GeoCities. He saw animated chubby cherubs, read chit-chat about astrological signs (and Myers-Briggs personality tests), saw vampire lore, heard about pet birds of a 17-year-old, read fan fiction starring Hanson, and checked out more Web counters, guestbooks and "favorite links" than he'll ever need in a lifetime.

His conclusion: We should ban these monstrosities. The Web is supposedly about liberating everyone around the world to publish whatever they want so everyone can see it. That's a beautiful sentiment for the high-minded set that reads Salon, lives on The Well, and wouldn't enter free-for-all communities like GeoCities with a gun to their head. But the rest of us have had enough of personal diaries of teenage angst, half-baked resumes, favorite bands, and never-ending "shout-outs."

Freedom of speech is one thing; freedom to splatter the Web with personal crap is another. But trying to ban personal Web pages would only bring an even more dreaded event: the online protest. Would pages go black on the day our bill was brought before Congress? Would blue ribbons make a comeback? We shudder at the thought.

In the interest of stamping out personal home pages -- but without arousing too much scrutiny -- we propose the following:

* Personal Web pages should never be free. Even if you charge people a dollar a year, you'd eliminate about 95 percent of the bad apples.

* Three typos and out. A panel of spelling and grammar experts fan out to examine home pages, sending offenders warning emails for typographical errors or grammatical mishaps. On the third warning, the site will be shut down, and the offender will have to pass English 101 (or French 101, or Japanese 101, or whatever the case) to get a home page license again.

* Any venture capitalist or banker who is considering an investment in a community mega-site such as GeoCities, Tripod or The Globe must first spend 10 straight hours surfing the site. If the person can say, "there's a lot of great creativity out there" with a straight face, the investment can go forward.

* Password protection for all personal pages. This will protect people from stalkers, ID thieves and hackers, while simultaneously protecting the public from a puke-shaded background and rotating GIFs of pet parrots.

* Art royalties. Everyone creating a personal page must first get permission for each background design, clip art and font that they steal from other pages -- or pay special royalties to the original creators.

* Homecams are required to show 5 percent educational material. All those damn Web cameras focused on navels, fishbowls, TVs and programmers' offices should come under the same rules as network TV. (This could backfire if people start reading "Moby Dick" on camera 1.2 hours per day.) In the end, we probably can't stop the proliferation of personal home pages, but we can hope to contain them...or at least make people aware that cyberspace is turning into a landfill of human waste.

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"3-Minute Roast" is a weekly, advertisement-free, opinionated rip on anything that strikes our fancy in the online world.

Max Schlickting - Editor-in-Chief
Barbara Yalpsid - Online Editor
Lefty Periwinkle - First Amendment Expert

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