As many of you already know, I had the good fortune to be able to attend the Webby Awards in my adopted hometown of San Francisco on May 11. The Webby Awards were fancy, they were ritzy, they were star-studded, they were wacky. And one thing they also were: informative. As the nominees were called out, category after interminable category, most of the whisperings I heard about me went something like this:

"Have you been to that site?"
"That site looks so cool."
"I want to check that out."
"I'm definitely going there after the show."

One of the sites that had me muttering a similar string of words was the night's winner for best personal Web site, cockybastard.com. If you were at the show, you may think my interest was in the site's progenitor, a white-fur-coated fellow named John Halcyon Styn. Sure he danced around and threw his big personality about the auditorium. Sure he talked about feeling the love (though I didn't know which love, exactly, to feel). Sure he had those wacky pigtails with pastel colored wrappings. But I live in San Francisco, and guys like this are a dime a dozen. No, my interest was in the category itself.

When it Was All Personal
Since the Web came to be, personal Web sites have constituted the bulk of the electronic juice flowing to and fro on the Internet. Indeed, the personal site, or home page, was almost the only kind of site there was until all those companies out there figured out what a big thing it all was shaping up to be and got their tails in gear to join Aunt Marge and Cousin Dave on the Web. Since then, I haven't thought too much about the concept of a personal site. Except that I have one. And believe me, it's getting a full redesign just as soon as I finish this column.

So, after a quick gander at Cocky Bastard's expertly designed, and Flash-heavy, foray into the personal-site world, I decided to take a little stroll in this world myself. I started out at justin.org, the personal site for the young techie Justin Hall. Hall was at Wired in the heady early days when designers slept on cots in the office, the better to be near their code. He caused quite a stir back then for publishing his journal, sans censoring, on the Web. I checked out Justin's journal, which he still keeps up, and I think it's pretty cool. It consists mainly of tidbits about himself, his life, his day, his girlfriend, historical events that happened on his birthday (which also happens to be my birthday), and links to other online journals he finds interesting. In short, it is light, if personal, entertainment.

Better Than Big
I checked out some other personal sites on the Web, mostly of the online journal variety (which strikes me as the most natural extension of the personal site, photo montages coming in a close second). It turns out there are quite a few, and lo, if some of the best looking sites I've seen lately didn't turn out to be personal Web sites.

Willa Cline runs a couple of personal sites. She's got willa.com, which contains her journal, and my favorite, mood-swings.org, which is a sort of personal portal site for everything she finds interesting. She's got links to other journal sites, a daily logbook of the happenings in her world, a slew of links to astrology sites (I was so happy!), and links to HTML resources.

Estrogen, another daily updated chronicle of one woman's life and the little and big events that shape it, is at http://jackie.nu/estrogen. And for the WebCam fans among you, this one's got Estro-Cam. If cams are your thing, also be sure to check out the infamous JenniCam, and the WozCam, which lets you can watch Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak at work.

The Bleat of a Different Drummer
My favorite personal Web site so far is the Daily Bleat. The snappy journal writing on this site made me laugh out loud (that's LOL for you Web acronym jockeys), and the site's crisp aesthetic is a joy to look at.

It's funny, isn't it, that in the mad rush for the Web and amidst all the attention bestowed upon the dot-com empires, we should forget the personal site, the medium that started the whole thing. Myself, I'm taking a break from corporate dot com's for a while (well, except for the entertainment sites, which I can't live without), and I'm going to concentrate on the cream of the independent Web. Sure there's a lot of crap out there -- we're always saying this -- but there are some people on the Web doing really good work purely for the sake of doing good work. That's something you don't see everyday, and something we should all come back to from time to time, if only to remind ourselves that the Web is still the most democratic (even anarchic) medium of them all.

Read more by Andrea Dudrow.