SiteLight: Found On The Web
Tonight the SiteLight shines on Bill Brown’s Found On The Web. Bill is a good friend, and I’m glad to be able to share his particular obsession with you.
What is this site?
FOTW (motto: “We Surf So You Don’t Have To”) is dedicated to quick links to random stuff found, well, on the web. The site dates to November 2001, and categories include such fare as meatspace hijinks and t-shirts i’d never wear; Bill is a friend, and he’s prolific too: FOTW had 153 posts in January of this year, 118 in February, and has 634 posts waiting to be filed.
Why I read this site:
Found On The Web is a firehose of stuff I’d never read if it didn’t pour into my RSS reader overnight. I clicked a few times and I was hooked - some of it is hilarious, some of it is like watching the proverbial train wreck - people put this stuff on the web? Indeed they do, and people like Bill find it. Even when you really really wish they wouldn’t.
Why you should read this site:
- How else will you find all the things you never wanted to read? :-)
Q & A:
Steve: How did you get into blogging and how long have you been at it?
Bill: I first heard about blogging when Pyra was working on a project management app and deployed Blogger as an interim release. I opened up a Blogger account immediately but didn’t even attempt to craft a blog until March 2000 and it petered out almost immediately. I started in earnest
http://www.bbrown.info/blogs/bblog/archives/well-here-it-is-the.cfm
Steve: What got you going on FOTW?
Bill: Found on the Web had its genesis in my former pottery painting studio’s web site in November 2001. I wanted a reason for people to keep coming back to the site and people always seemed to like the sites I shared with them. Once the pottery studio failed in July 2003, I moved the blog to my personal site and then to its own domain in early December 2004.
Steve: Found On The Web has some… odd links. How in the world do you find this stuff, and just who do you imagine reads it? :-)
Bill: I subscribe to 186 blogs on BlogLines but I don’t just take stuff from other blogs and repackage it. I also get stuff from the dozens of mailing lists I subscribe to, friends, family, and Yahoo/DMOZ trawling. Luckily, it doesn’t take long to evaluate a site’s appropriateness and post it to the Web so I can sometimes do dozens of links a day. I try to publish a mix of weird, useful, and funny links.
I know for a fact that many of my friends visit the site regularly. Once I got off the pottery studio site, I could really spread my wings and link to a much wider spread of links—ones that really wouldn’t be appropriate for my business. When I blog, I try to post links that I find funny, interesting, or useful.
Steve: What odd friends you must have. Oh, wait… ;-)
Bill: Don’t judge me by the company I keep!
Steve: What is the “best” link you’ve ever come across, and why?
Bill: It’s hard to say because there have been many that just made me laugh and laugh. The best link I ever had was in the post linked below and it was the best because I think I was one of the first to have discovered some of these oddball costumes. At least, this one was heavily linked soon after I posted it on MetaFilter.
http://www.foundontheweb.org/archives/2004/08/only-one-at-the-party
Steve: Do you ever see a site and think “oh, so and so will love/hate this?”
Bill: Hmm, not particularly. I occasionally get a mental image of my wife rolling her eyes as I’m posting a link. That could just be a flashback since I’ve seen that look long before I ever started blogging.
Steve: What kind of feedback do you get from FOTW, and do you care?
Bill: Zilch. Nothing. I’ve created well over 2,000 entries in my blogging career and I think I could count the number of emails I’ve received on one hand. I really don’t care because I blog for myself, whether it’s to organize my thoughts or to collect interesting links. If I cared whether people read my stuff, I would have quit this years ago. My traffic didn’t break 1,000 page views in a month until it had been up for over a year.
Steve: What would you like to be the future of the site? Any interesting plans?
Bill: Well, I don’t know if I’m supposed to discuss this but I’ve sold the movie rights for Found on the Web to a well-known Hollywood studio. Just kidding.
I intend to continue blogging in obscurity. My site will continue to be extremely low bandwidth, though I may get a logo someday. I suppose if I could find someone else who enjoys the sifter’s life, I might add an additional author or two. But I don’t want to be another BoingBoing or LinkFilter knock-off, so I’ll probably just keep doing what I’m doing.
Thanks, Bill!
