Sites for sore eyes.

I dropped round to Ayup Towers today to say hello and have a bevvy or three, and we got onto the subject of whether there was a good website in the county. Some guy from California had been in touch, asking which were the best websites in Yorkshire.

And that sparked the argument. Because I'm not into these well organized brochure-like cobwebsites that clog up the search engines. I don't care if they load in a nano-second, and reads like an aural glass of Guinness, I bloody hate the flash gets. Every one of em.

For me the website died when commerce got hold of it and turned the web into the Yellow Pages. Endless crappola trying to flog you stuff, or ram bad porno down your throat. Nasty, banner-added pop-up commercial garbage of the highest order now infests the net.

A good site in Yorkshire? Don't make me laugh.

To me the best sites on the web are the personal homepages. And yes, you can find them - Go to Google and search for the word Yorkshire, and a second word - dafter the better - and then go right to the back of the search. You heard me. The very back. Past all the keyword rich, professionally meta-tagged commercial stuff, or the earnest well meaning civically funded stuff, and get lost in the truly wonderful world of the personal homepage.

Here you will find the heartbeat of the net - the real people communicating their love of the medium, exploring their magnificent obsession.

It may be a place, a family, a celebrity or something magnificently wacky and weird. It might be an online collection of pictures of buses, or devoted to tattoos or henna patterns, or signposts, or some mad old bastards that released a half-decent record once.

This to me is what the web is all about. It sometimes is shrouded in the hideousness of commercial pop up stuff to compensate for the "free" domain name, but broadly speaking this is where the life of the Internet resides.

I know they're going on about how people are ready to pay for 'content' (whatever the hell THAT is) but if you make half an effort there's bound to be a homepage that provides something better for nothing.

The Ayup people here are planning to give some sort of a Yorkshire web Oscars out at the end of the year, and I'm fascinated by what sort of sites that they are going to pick on. Hopefully it will be the mad ones, the bad ones and the weird ones.

I don't want any flashy shite, or anything festooned with reciprocal banners. Anything with a pop-up should be instantly disqualified! Let's celebrate the REAL websites of Yorkshire. Ones with personality and energy - with vim and vigour. The websites that spit in your eye.

To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Whoso would be a webmaster, must be a nonconformist. He who would upload immortal webpages must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own website."

Any nominations?

Blogga.