The Web Is Bigger Than Its Front Door

6:42 p.m. / Connect

The modem makes its usual argument with the telephone line. A dial tone, a sequence of numbers, then the metallic exchange that somehow means two machines have agreed to speak. For the next hour, the house phone belongs to the computer.

The browser opens to a page designed to contain the day. There is news in one column, weather in another, stock prices, shopping, sports, horoscopes, an advertisement, and a box for searching the rest of the internet. Mail waits behind a small icon near the top. Everything has been arranged so there should be no reason to leave.

The web portal carries a simple dream: become the front door, then persuade everyone that the house ends in the lobby.

The companies competing for that position use a revealing word. They want a site to be sticky. A visitor should remain, click another story, check another price, open another page carrying another advertisement. Links are welcome when they lead deeper inside. A link outward is a leak.

It is a sensible business goal. It is also the opposite of what makes the web feel new.

6:47 p.m. / Take the wrong exit

A search for instructions on repairing a bicycle light produces several pages of results. The first useful page belongs to no publication anyone has heard of. It is part of a personal site maintained by someone in Oregon. The instructions sit beside a photograph of a touring bicycle, a list of favorite science-fiction novels, and a link titled “Things I was wrong about.”

The repair advice is clear. The rest of the site is difficult to resist.

One link leads to a page in Finland about winter cycling. That page belongs to a web ring, so a button at the bottom leads to the next site, which contains a scanned map and a long account of a trip made in 1997. The design changes completely at every stop. Backgrounds shift from gray to dark blue. Text becomes yellow. A small image takes thirty seconds to reveal itself from top to bottom.

None of this is efficient. That is why it feels like travel.

A portal is designed to make many subjects feel as if they came from one place. The open web does the reverse. One subject passes through many hands, and each hand leaves evidence. A broken link, an odd typeface, a careful explanation, a page last updated fourteen months ago: these details reveal that information did not arrive from a system. Someone put it there.

The result is uneven. Pages are confusing. Facts contradict one another. Navigation disappears. A “best viewed in” notice announces that the visitor has brought the wrong browser. Sometimes the only route back is the browser’s Back button.

Yet the roughness carries useful information. It says the web is still being made by people who do not need permission to make it.

7:18 p.m. / View source

Every page contains a small invitation that other media do not offer. The browser can show how it was assembled.

Choose View Source and the polished surface gives way to angle brackets, image names, links, tables, and comments left behind by whoever built it. Much of the code is mysterious. Enough of it is readable. A heading looks like a heading. A link contains the address where it goes. Save a copy, change a few words, open it again, and the browser obeys.

The distance between seeing a web page and making one can be crossed in an evening.

This fact may matter more than the current arguments about which portal will win. The web is not only a new way to receive information. It is a publication system with the door left unlocked. A student can publish research notes. A neighborhood shop can list its hours. A collector can build the best available guide to a subject too narrow for a book. The pages may be plain, but they can occupy the same network as the largest newspaper.

They do not occupy it equally. A popular address, a fast server, and a place in a search directory bring enormous advantages. Many people still lack a connection at home. Building a page is easier than getting anyone to find it. The web has not removed money, geography, reputation, or skill.

It has lowered one particular barrier: the moment at which a person may begin.

No editor has to approve the bicycle page. No broadcaster has to believe winter cycling will attract a large audience. The page needs a file, a server, and someone willing to link to it. That is a modest change in procedure with an immodest effect. Subjects that were too small to distribute can now find the few people for whom they are large.

7:46 p.m. / The expensive lobby

Money has arrived faster than manners.

Companies add “.com” to their names and speak as if a web address were a business plan. Advertising is expected to support services that cost real money to operate but ask visitors to pay nothing. New shops promise to replace old shops before proving that boxes can be delivered for less than the cost of sending them.

Earlier this year, confidence seemed to be the main fuel. Now share prices are falling, offices are shrinking, and some bright advertisements belong to companies that may not be here much longer. The correction is painful for the people whose jobs and savings are inside it. It is also exposing a confusion that has followed the boom: the internet and the internet business are not the same thing.

A company can fail without proving that the network was a fad. A bad shop can close on a useful street.

The web does need businesses. Connections, servers, tools, reporting, delivery, and reliable services have costs. Commerce is not an invasion from outside; people are part of the web, and people buy things. The problem begins when every page is judged by how long it can trap a visitor or how quickly it can turn attention into a sale.

Under that measure, the best bicycle repair page is almost worthless. It answers the question and lets the visitor go. It may even send the visitor elsewhere. It creates value that is difficult for its maker to collect.

For a network of links, that apparent weakness is a form of health.

8:11 p.m. / Make a door

A personal home page is called a home page for good reason. It is not the whole web. It is a place to begin, a small arrangement of what someone knows, likes, makes, and wants others to find.

Most home pages will never attract a crowd. Their counters may move slowly. Their guestbooks may collect more advertisements than guests. They still establish something worth protecting: the right to decide what the front door opens onto.

The large portals want one entrance for everyone. The better possibility is millions of entrances. A school page leads to a teacher’s notes. A band page leads to another band. A technical answer leads to the person who tested it. Search helps when the route is unknown; links continue the journey once a useful mind has been found.

This structure is untidy because no one controls it. It is vulnerable to neglect, fashion, commercial pressure, and links that stop working. It is also capable of growth no single company could plan. The web becomes larger whenever someone adds a page and more connected whenever someone chooses to point away from it.

There is a temptation to wait for better tools, a faster connection, or a reason grand enough to deserve publication. Waiting misses the character of the moment. The web is still close enough to the workbench that ordinary pages can influence what it becomes.

Make the page about the narrow subject. Write the instructions nobody else has written. Keep a list of useful places. Link generously. Let someone leave.

8:34 p.m. / Disconnect

The session ends with another click and a sudden silence. The telephone belongs to the house again. Most of the pages visited tonight are gone from the screen, reduced to a few entries in the browser history and one new bookmark.

The portal will be there at the next connection, updated and crowded, asking once more to contain the day. It can remain the front door.

A door is useful because it opens.