Sage Weil, Webring

Once in a while, aimless experimentation can lead to something great. That's what happened when Sage Weil came up with Webring, a grassroots system of organizing sites that might someday give search engines a run for their money. It all started in the summer of 1995, when Weil was just 17. Surfing the Web, he happened across a project called EUROPa, a set of Web pages linked in a ring-like fashion. EUROPa--Expanding Unidirectional Ring of Pages--was created by Denis Howe at London's Imperial College "just to see how far it would spread." Sites from around the world joined the ring, and it grew larger and larger. Webring was born when Weil decided to improve on the concept by linking pages in the ring via a centralized CGI script. This improvement allowed site maintainers to point to a Webring address that would in turn look up the current URL for the next site in the ring, eliminating the need to update anchor tags. The CGI script was up and running by August of 1995. A month later, "I realized how easy it would be to create multiple rings and made a few quick modifications to the script," Weil explains. Soon thereafter the first "themed ring" emerged: a set of sites devoted to English-language instruction called ESLoop. More rings sprouted as Webring's reputation grew.

Sage Weil Age: 20 Where: Claremont, CA Job: Webring director, Starseed Inc. Current project: Finishing design work on Cydonia, a multimedia space adventure Platform: Linux Web pet peeve: None! Favorite site: Swanky

Today Webring sports more than 455,000 sites registered in over 23,500 rings. There is a ring for every subject you might find on the Web--from art and culture to sex and drugs, from Windows and Unix to Fords and Chevys. Individual site builders join rings to increase traffic or simply to become part of something larger than a single site.

Webring itself is becoming larger all the time. That's one reason Weil sold Webring last year to Starseed, which put it on a more robust server and let Weil get out from under the daily administrative tasks. Starseed president Charley Lanusse is adamant that Webring remain a self-building, grassroots endeavor, free of censorship or editorial restrictions, and that Webring members not be forced to display advertisements or otherwise alter their pages.

Lanusse sees Webring becoming a viable alternative to search engines because its searches tend to produce more relevant results. When you search for Star Trek from Webring's search engine, you get links to numerous rings that have been tagged specifically by their developers as Star Trek-oriented--including the 550 sites in Locutus' Assimilation Ring and the nearly 500 sites of the United Federation of Trek Sites.

Webring began as a personal experiment and became a way for individuals to share common interests. Now it's evolving into a new way of organizing and finding information on the Web. And where is Sage Weil? Concentrating on a project of a different sort: finishing his Bachelor's degree in computer science at Harvey Mudd College.

--Matthew Newton

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