By Pamela O-Connell

Let me back up for a second: According to Find/SVP, of the 27.7 million "current Net users," 13% have personal sites, which accounts for at least 4 million pages. By my count, that's an incredibly lowball estimate since the top six providers of homepages alone (of which Tripod is one) account for nearly 2.5 million pages, but it's the only statistic around.

Given how widespread this trend is, it's always a bit of a shock to check Nexis and see how few newspaper articles have focused on personal Web publishing. And the articles I do find? How do they cover this unprecedented window into our lives and cultures, this incredible grassroots phenomenon?

There are some ditzy but genial features about average folks setting up homesteads in cyberspace, but mostly what you get are kooks and creeps stories.

As usual, the mainstream marginalizes the Net by consistently focusing on the farthest fringes of Web experience. Disdain drips from the paper, or the screen, as the case may be. Some examples:

• Time Digital feature article Kooks.com:
  "The real, earthy Web remains a sideshow of shrines to boyfriends, collections of bad poetry, and other forms of desperate self-expression."
  [Time Digital is not online]
  
  
• A New York Times technology column by Edward Rothstein entitled Ruminations on the Web as Garbage Depository:
  "Sartre had it only partly right. Hell is not just other people, it's other people's home pages... To what end are these pages bobbing around?"
  [The New York Times site requires a free registration. Articles are searchable, but are served out dynamically and so cannot be linked to directly]

• Leslie Stahl discovers on 60 Minutes that anyone - yes anyone - can have a homepage and "call it anything they want!" (This segment opened with footage of an alien conspiracy homepage.) [60 minutes has only a brochure type home page]

These attitudes are the result of a sort of Net "illiteracy," according to John December, a consultant and editor of the influential online journal Computer-Mediated Communication: "Mainstream media has to get a clue about the expectations they bring to the Web. I've seen coverage that essentially bemoaned the fact that it is unedited...

"They need to realize the wide range of expressions that occur on the Web and the necessary media literacy required to judge them. Because of this ignorance, they are also fixated on the weirdos and odd Web pages out there — plenty of those, but that doesn't characterize the whole Web."

I see more than illiteracy. I suspect ill will.

Language is always telling. Watch out when personal pages are consistently described as "vanity pages" or "vanity publishing" (hello Wall Street Journal). Translation: How annoying that anyone can own a virtual printing press these days. The bar has been lowered for publishing, the mainstream media chortles, so let's focus on the lowest examples we can find. You want self publishing? Come and get it!

Of course, one could argue that a general degradation of judgment across media is what turns "kooks.com" into a "better" story than any serious explorations of personal-page trends. But the singular viciousness of homepage coverage indicates something else is at work here: A desire to crush the barbarians at the gate through ridicule. Even HotWired, original digerati and maintstream media critics that they are, often condescend to personal publishers. Here's an excerpt from an e-mail to members explaining the recent makeover of the service in which the creation of "member pages" (a kind of watered-down homepage) is a major feature: "Why the change? In the last year, the Web has grown up, and millions of people are making it part of their lives - building homepages, driving discussion, and otherwise leaving their mark on this new medium."

"In the last year"? I thought homepages were what came first...

The editors at HotWired should get a subscription to The New Yorker, which identified homepages as an important Net trend on October 16, 1995, in a piece by John Seabrook entitled Home On The Net. That article remains the best — and only truly serious — mainstream look at this grassroots movement of people carving out private spaces in a public medium. (The article itself is not online, so I'll have to send you to your library's microfiche to dig it up.)

But Hotwired, and other online media, are at least beginning to catch on. As Andrew Leonard, a well-known cyberspace journalist and frequent HotWired and Salon contributor, says: "Some portions of the mainstream media act as if they are threatened by the proliferation of unmediated media. It's as if all those people out there saying their own thing are going to be competition to the established arbiters of the published word. When in fact the truth is exactly the opposite -- personal pages are just one more source of information and insight that make the world a richer, more complex, more informative place."

I look at a lot of homepages. Finding examples of quality personal sites is what I do for the Mining Company. I won't dispute that I slog through plenty of drek, although I'm always annoyed by having to tack on that disclaimer. The Web is a mirror, an amplifier, of who we are and what we want to be. Of course there's a lot that is boring, and scary, and senseless. Have you looked around lately?

But there is also much that is serendipitous and wonderful, pages that renew your faith in the medium after all the propaganda about a "Web Wasteland" from the jaded, the elitists, and the sell-outs.

What do I find? Online diaries that are exploring uncharted territory between the private and the public; essays and rants from soulful voices that would otherwise be silenced; beautiful portfolios that stretch the boundaries of digital art and photography; idiosyncratic hobbyist pages that are widening public-domain knowledge in countless areas. And yes, even the simple, generic-style homepages of individuals, couples, and families that together provide a glimpse into ordinary lives on an unheard-of scale — a treasure trove for social and cultural historians. These are the people shaping the Web's future.

What a sad commentary that so much of the media ignores or indicts personal pages. They're burying a great story.

A convert from the world of traditional media, Pamela O'Connell boasts nine years as a reporter and editor at CMP Media Inc., most recently as Director of Content Development for TechWeb. She now works as a guide for The Mining Company, where she explores and highlights sites on the Personal Web Pages section. An advocate of the Real, she says, "You don't have to be a sociologist or a voyeur to be fascinated by what you'll find here: the humor and the tragedy, the goofy and the lofty, the weird and the touchingly normal."