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 •  Meta-Cool Resources
 •  The Idea Of "Cool"
 •  Cool Sites (Not Yet Categorized)
 •  Ultra Graphical
 •  Ultra Textual Or Anti-Graphical
 •  The Experience Of The Arbitrary
 •  "Ordinary" Cool
 •  Corporate & Government Cool
 •  Technologically Advanced Pages
 •  Tech Fetish (May Or May Not Overlap With Above)
 •  "Underground" Or "Edge" Sensibility
 •  Cool Personal Home Pages (Examples)
 •  Alternative Web Aesthetics
Resources
Laws Of Cool   Suggest a Link
[Top]
Meta-Cool Resources (Cool Sites Of The Day, Cool Metapages, Etc.)
All-In-One Cool Sites Page (All-Internet Shopping Directory)
Cool Central (Mecklermedia Corp.)
Cool Crescendo Site of the Day (requires MIDI player) (LiveUpdate)
Coolest Links on the Net (Rock 104)
Coolest on the Web (Project Cool, Inc.)
Cool Jargon of the Day (Stephen & Charles Jazdzewski)
Cool Links of the Week (Leigh Dulin, ITAC Systems, Inc.)
Cool Medical Site of the Week (William C. Donlon, DMD, MA)
Cool Roulette (random URL generator)
Cool Site of the Day U.K. ("Obviously inspired by Cool Site of the Day, but for us Brits who can't wait around all day for cool stuff to download from overseas")
Cool Site of the Day
Homepage (InfiNet Company)
Selected Resources:  
Cool-O-Meter ("rate today's cool site from 1 - 10")
Cool Site of the Year Awards 
Cool Zones 
Still Cool: Archive 
Cool Sites on the Web (Alan Westenbroek)
The Cool Word of the Day Page (Anthony Anderberg & Mike Bitz)
Der Web des Tages/Web of the Day (in German) (Virtual Page & Broker Research Center, Germany)
Dynamite Site of the Nite (Terra Ingogneta)
Extra Cool Sites (Pollanens-cyberland.com)
Fred Langa's HotSpots ("Every day, the best, most interesting, most useful, and strangest sites the Web has to offer") (Windows Magazine)
Netscape's "What's Cool?" Page 
NetWatch: Cool Sites! ("some of the most creative, unusual, or just plain weird sites") (Bill Myers)
Project Cool
Homepage (site that educates Web authors and developers in building "great websites"; contains gallery of cool pages, developer resources, forums, etc.) (Project Cool, Inc.)
Selected Resources:  
Future Focus (reflections on the future of the web)
Sightings ("great web sites")
Rachel's Cool Site For The Time Being (by Rachel, 6th grader)
TnT - Tristan and Tiffany's Cool Stuff for Kids 
Too Cool Awards (Too Cool Communications / Premier)
TUM Cool Site of the Week (Japan) 
Various Cool Links to the World (Julia D. Levitz, Drexel U.)
Visual Poetics Links (links page for Stanford Humanities Center lecture series on Visual Poetics; uses the categories of "hot," "cool," and "sub/lime" sites) (Susan E. Dunn, Stanford Humanities Center)
What's Cool ("This section presents some cool information, cool pictures, cool stories... Don't hesitate to provide additional cool things, we would appreciate it") (Canadian Space Agency)
What's Hot and Cool on the Web (Web's Edge, KZSU Radio, Stanford U.)
Yahoo! Cool Links 
[Top]
The Idea Of "Cool"
Jeff Rice (U. Florida), "What Is Cool? Notes on Intellectualism, Popular Culture, and Writing" (CTHEORY.NET)
[Top]
Ultra Graphical
Crash Site (original description: "The Crash Site is an extreme metaphor for an extreme situation, a collection of desperate measures, only for use in a crisis")
Fetishturgy (U. Florida project inspired by
Jason Brown's Page (UCSB) (requires graphical browser) (technically and aesthetically advanced set of pages of interest to literary and art theorists)
MkzdK (Stephen Miller)
 These are sites that create an intense, often high-bandwidth multimedia experience in which graphical representation dominates (but does not necessarily exclude) text. Under the torsion of the graphical regime, text often appears in severely "defamil
[Top]
The Experience Of The Arbitrary
Enternet Random Skate Video Or Photo (skateboard zen, with a random illumination generator)
Fortune Cookie Page (random-quote generator presented via the metaphor of a fortune cookie) (Lasse Ylitalo / Björn Knutsson)
The Information Supercollider (a random-link generator presented via the metaphor of internet info as "particles" and randomness as "collision"; takes you to a random site; then press "Reload" in Netscape or Ctrl-R in Lynx while viewing the site to
MagicURL Mystery Trip (random URL generator)
Random Knowledge Generator (calls up queries and answers from an archive of Web forum postings) (MAD Scientist Network, Washington U.)
Randomly Generated Insults 
The Surrealist Compliment Generator 
URouLette (random Web site generator) (Jill M. Sheehan)
[Top]
"Ordinary" Cool
Carolyn L. Burke's Diary (diary in HTML)
Diaries and Journals on the Internet (World Image Network)
Digital Self (online autobiography: "I dropped out of high school, I went to Yale, I did some drugs, I did some research, I played in a rock band, I married, I divorced, I had sex with strange women. . . .")
Mike and Anthony's Wired Room (wired dorm room at Dakota State U. tells you the state of its doors, lights, temperature, number of socks in drawer, etc.; visitors can activate a fan to blow on Mike and Anthony) (Note: site is now archival only; Mike and Anthony have graduated)
Motel Americana ("Welcome to Motel Americana. Here, you can re-live the glory days of the classic roadside motel") (Jenny and Andy Wood)
Online Cameras ("Wanna see what other ignorant humans ore doing right now?") (Aurora Gory Avedis)
Paul's (Extra) Refrigerator (technical detail on the current temperature and other status of Paul's other refrigerator; includes extensive meta-technical detail on how the above information is monitored) (Paul Haas)
Random Camera 
The Semi-Existence of Bryon ("On this page I keep my diary. Sometimes it is interesting, sometimes not but it is always real. It is updated daily.")
The Simulator (takes you through the day from getting up to driving to work to making MacDonald hamburgers, burger after burger . . . etc.; at each point, there is interactive "choice") (Garnet Hertz)
Tabatha's Days at Work ("Welcome to the automagical Tabatha MPEG movie maker. She has a camera pointed at her which snaps a photo every five minutes") (Martin Richard Friedmann)
Valley URL (enter a URL and see the page translated into a parody of Southern California "Valley speak") (The 80s Server)
Wearable Computing (original VoS description: "Steve at MIT wears an online camera on his head; see what he sees: 'It's fun being a cyborg' "; site has now expanded into a general gateway to wearable computing resources) (Steve Mann)
What is Miles Watching on TV? (good example of "mundane cool")
What's Inside Jeremy's Wallet? (Jeremy Wilson)
[Top]
Corporate & Government Cool (selection of sites that have appeared on various well-known "cool site" of the day lists)
Bank of America (featured on Netscape's "What's Cool?" page as per 3/7/96)
Eastman Kodak Company (featured on Netscape's "What's Cool?" page as per 3/7/96)
Levi Strauss (featured on Netscape's "What's Cool?" page as per 3/7/96)
Money & Investing Update (Wall Street Journal) (featured on Netscape's "What's Cool?" page as per 3/7/96)
Quicken Financial Network (featured on Netscape's "What's Cool?" page as per 3/7/96)
United Parcel Service (featured on Netscape's "What's Cool?" page as per 3/7/96)
U. S. Central Intelligence Agency (featured on Netscape's "What's Cool?" page as per 3/7/96)
U. S. Internal Revenue Service (featured on Netscape's "What's Cool?" page as per 3/7/96)
Wells Fargo Bank (featured on Netscape's "What's Cool?" page as per 3/7/96)
[Top]
Technologically Advanced Pages
Electric Postcards (send a picture postcard to a friend; sendable via Lynx but viewable only through a graphical Web browser)
Shadow Server ("The apparatus is housed in a lightproof box that contains physical objects, some of which move of their own accord within the apparatus. Viewers can interact with these objects via buttons. Viewers can select any combination of five buttons a
The Tele-Garden (new experiment in telepresence from the creator of the Robot Tele-Excavation Project: use a robot arm to plant seeds in a garden and watch them grow. Note: you must return regularly to water your plant or it will die) (Ken Goldberg, USC)
Ulm Model Railroad Server (watch and operate a model railroad; requires Netscape and ability to handle multi-image inline GIF's)
X-Change S-pace (innovative forms-based gateway to collectively written and edited hypertexts; anyone can create an HTML document and mount it on this Hamburg server; anyone can edit any HTML document in this "space"; the display "topography" of
[Top]
Tech Fetish (May Or May Not Overlap With Above)
The Anti-Computer Page (chosen for "Worst of the Web" list and proud of it)
Gravis Joystick Screwdriver Home Page 
Online Cameras ("Wanna see what other ignorant humans ore doing right now?") (Aurora Gory Avedis)
Paul's (Extra) Refrigerator (technical detail on the current temperature and other status of Paul's other refrigerator; includes extensive meta-technical detail on how the above information is monitored) (Paul Haas)
Technomads
Nomadic Research Labs ("created by Steven K. Roberts, who has been a technomad for the past 13 years -- wandering 17,000 miles around the U.S. on various versions of a computerized recumbent bicycle known as Behemoth") (Faun Skyles)
Pages of Folks from Technomads ("technomads" are defined as nomadic people who carry major tech along with them; e.g., Steve Mann) (Kathy Bilton)
Recumbents and Technomadics (Kathy Bilton)
Wearable Computing (original VoS description: "Steve at MIT wears an online camera on his head; see what he sees: 'It's fun being a cyborg' "; site has now expanded into a general gateway to wearable computing resources) (Steve Mann)
[Top]
Cool Personal Home Pages (Examples)
Allucquere Rosanne Stone 
Aviva Rosenstein 
Cosma's Home Page 
cynsa beans 
Flaunt (Shauna) 
Magaly's Homepage (in English and Spanish)
Meng Weng Wong 
Oblivion Science (home page of Timothy Dugdale, U. Windsor, Canada)
Paul's a Computer Geek (Paul Schrank)
The Rest of Me (Karawynn Long)
Spacegirl (distinctive personal home page that doubles as online store)
Stuart Moulthrop's Alternative Home Page 
Stuart Moulthrop (U. Baltimore)
Timothy Leary's Home Page (an immersive web-environment giving the user an interactive tour to Leary's house, art, books, etc.; also has a daily update on the course of Leary's terminal cancer)
Victoria Vesna (Art Studio, U. California, Santa Barbara)
Zola 
[Top]
Alternative Web Aesthetics
Antithesis To Cool
Anthony's Most Annoying of the Web 
Kooks Museum (collection of allegedly strange, schizo, conspiratorial, hateful, quackish, and other tilted ideas; a walk on the wild side of intellectual history) (Donna J. Kossy)
Mediocre Site of the Day (now defunct) (Jensen Harris)
Pointless Communications Corp.: Bottom 95% of All Web Sites (spoof of Web rating services)
Totally Useless! Fifty Exquisite Sites With No Purpose (Ambit: The Web Waystation)
Useless WWW Pages (meta-useless page of pointless Weg pages; not exactly the same concept as "worst of the web") (created by Paul Phillips; continued by Steve Berlin)
Worst of the Web (inheritor of the original, now defunct Mark Mirsky "Worst of the Web" site)
The Worthless Page ("this page is dedicated to finding worthless, useless, and humourous pages on the internet")
Other Variants
Geek Chic ("Welcome to Geek Chic. [That's pronounced 'geek sheek', as in 'très chic', which is French for 'way cool']")
sub/lime ("Inspired by Alan Liu's observation that there are hot and cool sites on the web but no sublime ones, this space imagimes sites that are sublime in the transitive technical sense: subjected to heating and cooling in order to be transformed&q
Tragic Pages
Anne Frank Home Page (the tragedy of this page is enhanced by the fact that copyright problems forced the removal of the page, leaving a reminder)
Faces of Sorrow: Agony in the Former Yugoslavia (photos by 36 photojournalists from 14 countries depicting "unspeakable acts of destruction waged by the warring parties . . . through the recent peace accord"; also includes "corroboratory articles and texts from international source
Kimberly Jean Pollard (Feb. 1, 1961 - Aug. 25, 1995) ("Today I ask your help in understanding how this beautiful young girl, who seems so serene and self-assured, could grow up to be a woman consumed by alcoholism, bulimia, confusion, and self-loathing, dead at 34 of a bleeding brain")
Remembering Nagasaki (selective Web version of bicoastal exhibit of 100+ pictures of the ruins of Nakasaki taken by Yosuke Yamahata on Aug. 10, 1945) (San Francisco Exploratorium)
Stillbirth & Neonatal Death Support Page (SANDS) (Tim Law)
Twenty Exemplary Cases ("a photographic work and a text description of twenty of the more than 500 documented cases of torture in Brazil during the Militarism that took place between 1964 and 1980") (Brazil On Line Publishing)
[Top]
"Underground" Or "Edge" Sensibility (Examples)
Barrel o' Suck 
Beyond Wierd 
Church of the SubGenius 
Japan Edge (English) (Japanese "edge"/street underground culture archive)
Linkage: Pug Guide to the Underground Web (includes links to modern and contemporary authors on the avant-garde, punk, cyberpunk, etc., edge)
Tres Bizzare ("some of these sites are pretty, some make neat use of the web, some are tasteless, and most of them will make you scratch your head and wonder why") (Dave Solko)
The Weird Places On The Net (Martin Deiman)
[Top]
Ultra Textual Or Anti-Graphical (Including &Quot;Lynx Enhanced&Quot;)
Dehanced for Lynx (polemically anti-graphical page that lists the "worst" "dehanced" pages on the web for Lynx users) (Daniel Dern, Bobbi Fox, Adam Gaffin)
The Enhanced for Netscape Hall of Shame (collection of allegedly extravagant Netscape-enhanced sites) (Flux)
Extremely Lynx
Homepage (Subir Grewal)
Pages Enhance for Lynx 
These are sites that react self-consciously against the graphical emphasis of the Web by attempting a textual reverse-cool.  
UnderWired (parody of Wired Magazine ("Type Design vs. Legibility: Who Gives a Shit?")
[Top]
Cool Sites (Not Yet Categorized)
1002situations: Participatory Heimat/Homeland Exhibition ("place text, photos, and sound that define your 'heimat'/homeland into this 'virtual museum.'" "Starting on Sept. 15, 1995, the exhibition . . . will be materialized and put on display for two weeks at the Castle Tollet in Upper Aust
antont: Earth Page ("Mark your position on my experimental, auto-updating map of the world!")
Centre for the Easily Amused
Homepage 
Selected Resources:  
Miss Walker's Guide to Employee Internet Etiquette 
Random Silliness 
Short Attention Span Site of the Week ("now Java enhanced!")
Sites That Do Things 
The Creative Internet Home Page 
Cynthia Rose's Real Time Hot Tips 
The Electronic Cafe (NEXUS-London home page)
Grafica Obscura 
Heather Has Two Mommies (political spoof in the form of a children's book; includes links on the topic of political correctness) (MIT Center for Political Correctness)
Internet in a Baby (ultimate interface for the computer-phobic: clickable image of a baby--actually a small child--leading to "every web page of any significance"; but it can't find Voice of the Shuttle ;-)
Netgram (retro-net: experimental "e-mail to paper mail gateway"; converts your e-mail message into a free, one-page paper letter sent to the party of your choice)
Streams and Brian Present Piercing Mildred (interactive body modification and piercing)


VoS is woven by Alan Liu and a development team
in the U.California, Santa Barbara, English Department.
Contact: ayliu@english.ucsb.edu — To suggest links for inclusion in VoS, please use the "Suggest a Link" button on the relevant category page. To offer feedback on the site, please use the feedback form.
Guide: What the Title of VoS Means Navigating and Bookmarking VoS Contributing Links Helping Edit VoS Technical Specs Credits

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