Featured Links
May 7, 2001

Featured link of the week: Single White Product

This article originally appeared in Feed in 1997. I'm not sure why, but something about it really resonated with me, and I re-read periodically. One of the great things about the Internet is that it's really easy to find articles you read years earlier. If this article had appeared in, say, New Yorker, it would be a lot more difficult to find. I could go to the library, pore through the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature until I found the article I was looking for, and request the appropriate issue from the librarian. God knows how long it would take.

To find "Single White Product," I went to Feed, typed "product testing" into the site search engine, and had the article on my screen in a matter of seconds. Even if I hadn't remembered where I read it, a search engine can usually find things for you pretty quickly.

This article is four years old, but it still feels very fresh. No doubt that's because things are even more rigorously focus-grouped today than they were in 1997. And no one who follows modern political campaigns or watched Making the Band or Popstars can have any doubt that human beings are product tested every day.

Other links to things I read years ago but are still readily available on the Internet:

• Flowers For Trinitron - I have a strange fondness for jokes about the 1959 short story "Flowers For Algernon" by Daniel Keyes. I can't explain it, I just think they're really funny. One of my favorite cartoonists, Ruben Bolling, did this take on the story in 1995. 
• imminent drowning of the net in sticky brown liquid - This dates all the way back to 1994, but I didn't read it until I started reading Usenet newsgroups in 1995 or 1996. It's a little dated now, and even back in 1994 I don't think many people believed that Usenet would be the dominant form of Internet communications 25 years hence. (Usenetters have been predicting the demise of Usenet almost as long as there has been a Usenet.) On the other hand, given the immense popularity of ad-supported e-mail services like Hotmail, maybe the person who wrote this wasn't as far off the mark as some might think. 
• Cooking HKN Hamburgers and Lighting the Grill - This site was all the rage back in 1996 when Dave Barry wrote about it in his column. It's the personal homepage of a systems engineer named George Goble who used to light charcoal with liquid oxygen. The site has amazing pictures and video that must be seen to be believed.
• Increase & Diffusion - Back in 1996, the Smithsonian Institution thought it would be a good idea to start a web magazine. Less than a year later it was dead. But nothing on the web is ever really dead, and for whatever reason the Smithsonian has elected to leave the Increase & Diffusion articles online (along with an editor's note, dated May 1997, promising that they would soon resume a regular publishing schedule). Some of the articles are pretty good, but it's worth visiting just because it's such a well preserved example of a Ghost Site.

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