Introduction to the Weird Wide Web Tour

The CD in your drive right now lets you explore the famous World Wide Web without actually being online -- indeed, without even owning a modem! Not the entire Web, of course, but what we like to call the Weird Wide Web: the funniest, weirdest, bizarrest corners of human imagination. We love these twisted, hilarious Web pages so much that we wrote a book about them. It's called, of course, "The Weird Wide Web." It's available, in paper form, at your bookstore, published by IDG Books and written by Erfert Fenton and David Pogue.

The purpose of this CD tour is to let you read parts of our book -- and actually visit the Web pages we're describing. This electronic tour works exactly like the real Web works: Just click any words you see that are in blue underlined type like this -- and you'll be taken to a new "Web page," without ever leaving the comfort of this CD.

In other words, instead of just reading the hilarious descriptions of each Web page, you'll actually be able to see and play with them!

Obviously, this approach has its limits; we couldn't fit the entire World Wide Web onto your CD, even using StuffIt. So we've set up each Web page so that you can only click a couple of levels "deep." You won't be able to send e-mail, or enter contests, or link to every Web page in the world. (To do all that, you have to actually be online. That's why we've included the America Online starter kit on this CD.) You'll see what we mean.

Introduction to the Book

In its early days, the World Wide Web was a wonderful tool for scientists and academics, who exchanged ideas, published reports, conducted research, and participated in a glorious intellectual renaissance with their colleagues worldwide. But these days, the Web is slouching toward bedlam. Why? Because the masses got hold of the thing.

Here are the results of a survey we took, using a software search engine to count the number of times certain words occurred on the Web:

Scientific research

• "Nuclear fusion:" 3,000
• "UFOs:" 20,000

Influential people

• "Madame Curie:" 400
• "David Letterman:" 10,000

Music

• "Johann Sebastian Bach:" 2,000
• "Metallica:" 30,000

Cuisine

• "Filet mignon:" 3,000
• "Donuts:" 10,000

Agriculture

• "Chemical fertilizers:" 1,000
• "Crop circles:" 2,000

Need we say more?

As the Web's usefulness is plummeting, however, its level of fun is going through the roof. We're talking UFO lore, vile experiments with Hostess Twinkies, pet mummification services, poems about SPAM, and sound clips of William "Captain Kirk" Shatner singing "Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds." We decided to record the best of these pages in a book, "The Weird Wide Web."

This CD-based tour presents a sample of what you'll find in the book: the goofy, the witty, the off-color, and the generally weird pages that are wasting so much bandwidth -- and receiving so many visitors -- on the Web.

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