anal inventive Like many people, I am a fan of the fake rock band Spinal Tap. Unlike many people, I spent six months compiling a 500-entry guide to the band so I could post it on my home page.
Why? Because the Web offered me unlimited space, hypertext gave me a matrix, the Usenet group alt.fan.spinal-tap gave me an audience, and some wire in the back of my brain provided a dose of what I like to refer to as anal inventiveness.
That theory also would explain why I compiled and posted a subject index to three months of the supermarket tabloid Weekly World News, or why any number of people have undertaken similar, extraordinary Web-based projects. It certainly explains why detail-oriented Netizens create home pages: It allows us to organize our lives much like we organize our closets or as Time organizes the world. Computers and the Web permit the anal to sort and pack the clutter of life without ever running out of boxes (just add a new page!). It's an untamed monster, a wild frontier that calls for a hero like Conan the Librarian.
The Web has drawn the organizers of the world out of hiding and given them a playground. From its beginnings, the Web has been a battleground for control of its own chaos. Witness the search engine ad wars between the likes of Alta Vista, Excite and Lycos, each boasting of its thoroughness.
Now we even have sites such as Ixquick that search the search engines. We have Frequently Asked Questions that organize common queries about hundreds of subjects from anarchy to woodworking, followed by guides that organize the Frequently Asked Questions, followed by guides that organize the Frequently Asked Questions guides. We have sites that coordinate material about topics such as AIDS, gardening, sports, history, you name it.
The Web has no limits but its inability to catalog itself. As Steve Steinberg wrote in Wired, "The Web defines knowledge far more loosely than any library. Even the Total Library of Jorge Luis Borges, which contained all knowledge and its contradiction, didn’t include live video feeds of coffeepots. So if the entire Web can be organized, that goes a long way toward organizing all of knowledge as well."
That’s enough to ensure the devotion of anyone who feels a call to put things in their place. These are the folks who read Reader’s Digest as kids, who visit office supply stores to cheer themselves up, who feel relief when the two pieces of bread on a sandwich are shaped the same way. To these people—and I include myself—the Web is alternately a swirling galaxy in need of a strong center and blank slate where the components of life can be stretched out and examined.
The Web is a tantalizing proposition for dedicated list makers. In 1994, when Paul Phillips began archiving the extremes of online retentiveness at his Useless Pages site, his inspiration was Kenny Z’s list of his entire personal CD collection. That particular monument still stands, but Kenny has been one-upped by Jude Travers-Frazier, who lists every song on every CD he owns. Among the other sites Phillips and his successor, Steve Berlin, have discovered (and cataloged) are Hank Web, which chronicles online Hanks, a page that explains how to say "You eat like a pig" in 59 languages, an accounting of every song that Darren Embry has listened to since December 22, 1995, a list of typographical errors in William Shatner’s novel "The Return" and a chronicling of Shakespeare’s use of the word spleen.
I will not judge the usefulness of any sort of list—to a list maker, every inventory has its purpose, if only to be included in a guide to "useless" pages. The best sites on the Web are created and updated by obsessive programmers who can’t stand to have a link out of date, or to have less than a comprehensive resource. These are qualities you want in a Webmaster. Many online lists such as family histories, product catalogs or health services are incredibly useful. Exploring all this compulsiveness, I have never felt alone on the Web or ashamed of my propensity to find God (or the devil) in the details. The trick nowadays, amid the larger disorder, is to find something that hasn’t been accounted for.
The beauty of the Web is that you can approach it from any angle: One person’s obsession is another person’s reference. The downside is that there is always more work to be done. A keyword search on a major search engine for anal retentiveness (no hyphen) brought up 42 sites—but they weren’t listed in alphabetical order.