Net Detours

» see netdetours.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Net Detours called itself your guide to the Information Back Roads, and the logo was a pair of yellow highway diamonds reading "excursions off the info superhighway". It was a weekly column written by James Cook from 1995, about the parts of the web that were not useful: the Unofficial Waffle House Page, where you could read the chain's trivia and apply for your own virtual franchise, or the Cyrano Server, which wrote customized love poetry for the romantically challenged.

The format was a themed tour that ran over several weeks. One installment was a virtual vacation that barely started before it was time to stop for the night; the next picked up the drive and stopped for cyber-pancakes. Readers joined a ListBot mailing list to get notified of updates and to receive what the signup box called special "members only" articles. Near the bottom of the 1998 front page sits a line reporting that all links in this site were last verified December 28, 1997, which is a maintenance promise only a one-person site could make.

I came online in 1998, late enough that Net Detours was already most of the way through its run, and the Turkish version of this genre reached me through forum link lists rather than through a weekly American humor column. What the two shared was the premise underneath: that the web was still small enough for one person to walk it on your behalf and report back.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the cast ~

Cook wrote recurring characters into the column. Dr. W.W. Web, billed as a distinguished Professor of Netology at Internet U., descended from his virtual ivory tower to field reader questions under headings like The Future of Telecommunications and Break Up Microsoft. Web Link, the original Internet Detective, got a three-chapter noir serial whose first line runs "Of all the Web sites in the world, she had to access mine".

There was a verse department as well. Net Rhymes carried Gatesy @ the Bat alongside a Seuss parody called To Think That I Saw It On the World Wide Web. A section named Online Icons covered the web presence of famous people, including an Open Letter to Martha Stewart and a follow-up collecting the responses from Martha's fans. The whole register is closer to a syndicated newspaper humor column than to a link blog, which is roughly what it was.

~ the editorial note ~

Between 5 April and 20 July 2001, by the archive's own capture dates, Cook put an Editorial Note at the top of the page. It is not a shutdown announcement so much as an admission, and it is the best writing on the site.

"It's time for a little honesty here. This site hasn't been updated in a couple of years and isn't likely to get updated again any time soon. The reasons are as simple as the fact that I am now a full time web developer and as complex as the realization that the web just isn't the wild and crazy place it once was. It's now a giant commercial enterprise and, while that's probably a good thing (and a money maker for me) it just doesn't lend itself to what Net Detours was all about."

Then the line that earns the grave: "So consider this site a virtual archeological dig into the pre-IPO days of the web when Netscape ruled, Yahoo! was in fact just a couple of yahoos, and there was no MarthaStewart.com." He was describing a period that had ended about two years earlier, from inside it, while still holding the domain.

~ what happened to the domain ~

The site then changed almost nothing for seven more years. By 2008 Cook had retitled the page "Net Detours: When the Internet Was Fun" and relabeled the front matter as the NetDetours Classic Edition, turning the thing into an index of its own back catalog. The Internet Archive's last capture of that site is 30 January 2009.

By 10 January 2010 netdetours.com was serving a page headed "Net Detours, an Authoritative Article Directory", filled with syndicated spam about HEPA air purifiers and mesothelioma treatment options. That ran for several more years under a name Cook had built to mean the opposite. Today the domain answers with a 503 and the words "Site Currently Unavailable".

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