While Yahoo boomed, WebRing looped along in relative obscurity. Essentially a way for sites to share links with each other, rings all focus on the same subject matter, whether it's the work of Jane Austen, a ring of 52 sites, or Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgendered Disabled veterans of America, a ring with 274 sites.

WebRings form online communities in the truest sense of the overused phrase. They represent webmasters banding together to turn their scattered sites into something larger. If the online community of a GeoCities is more like a planned suburb where no one really talks to each other, WebRings is an overgrown village, bursting organically at the seams.

The rings themselves can be sublimely obsessive in their absurd exhaustiveness. One ring, called Scotties, contains no less than 96 sites on Scottish terriers. But at the most grandiose, WebRings can be seen as nothing less than an alternative way to navigate the Net. Flitting from one site to the next in a circle of sites on related topics selected by a human being is a different way to surf the Net than scanning the results of a search engine. Small, truly obscure sites that would likely be buried by a search-engine results page or never make it into Yahoo's own directory find a home in the right ring.

Back in 1995, a blond, baby-faced Oregon 17-year-old, named Sage Weil, created his first WebRing, inspired by a circle of sites called EUROPa, an acronym for Expanding Unidirectional Ring of Pages. The first ring he created grew to include 741 sites, and it still exists, tended by Andrea Stalnecker, 31, a stay-at-home mom in Central Pennsylvania, who is herself the ringmaster of some 40 rings.

Weil eventually wrote his own software program to create and manage rings. WebRing was essentially peer-to-peer, before the buzzword. It provided an easy way for ringmasters to create new rings, add sites and organize them. And it took off. Launched in mid-1996, by 1997, there were over 1,000 rings. By May of 1997 over 10,000. By April 1998, 40,000, and by Jan. 2000, 80,000.

But popularity brought new burdens. Although a Web ring was really just a unique collection of links, along with the descriptions of the sites in each ring, by 1997 even that piddling amount of information was overloading Weil's servers. He had neither the bandwidth, nor the time, to oversee an expansion.

"He was getting ready to go off to college," explains Killeen, who was working as an engineer at a small Ashland, Ore., company called Starseed, which bought WebRing from Weil.

The engineers at Starseed had big plans for WebRing. They saw it not just as another grass-roots community, but as a different way of navigating the ever burgeoning Web.

Then, in turn, the Web page hosting company GeoCities decided that it could use WebRing's technology to turn the millions of its so-called online communities into real communities. WebRing's technology, GeoCities hoped, would encourage traffic across all the GeoCities-hosted sites by linking them in rings, thus boosting advertising impressions. "They were really keen on WebRing, because it was just what they needed to organize all of those user sites together," explains Killeen.

It was a typical Internet business scheme: The value of the technology would make hosting the community worthwhile, even though the community showed no prospect for ever being profitable. WebRing couldn't even put ads on the sites in the rings, because it had no claim to the sites themselves -- just the links between them.

Plus, WebRing purposely did not require surfers to drill down from a central start page -- a hot ad property. It was a distributed network that sent surfers only onto the next link in the ring. "WebRings are designed to let you go between two sites without ever going through a central service," says James Huggins, 47, from Dallas, Texas, a devoted ringmaster who spends two to three hours a week on his rings and keeps the unofficial F.A.Q. The elliptical appeal of the rings is that most people find them by stumbling upon them by chance. Find one, and follow it to the next link in the chain. While it's possible to search a directory of all the rings, such top-down searching is not really what the system is about.

No matter, in late 1998, GeoCities bought Starseed for 775,000 shares of stock and $2 million in cash, a deal that, given Geocities' loopy stock price, valued what had been Sage Weil's high school hobby at $30 million.

But the deal had hardly been consummated before Yahoo, in turn, was gobbling up GeoCities.

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