Every year, TV Guide names its candidate for "The Best Show You're Not Watching" -- the one program so critically acclaimed that everybody "should" see it, but few actually do.
It's a little pretentious, isn't it? The American Public would probably like to think that it can pick the quality shows on its own, thank you very much. Even though every television viewer is subliminally influenced by advertising, complacency and a general laziness when it comes to changing the channel, nobody wants to hear TV Guide scolding poor viewing habits.
At least TV Guide admits that nobody watches the shows they like. The "Webby" awards, the wanna-be Oscars of the Internet, make no such concession. Each year, they tout the sites that their "esteemed judges" (perhaps I spoke too soon on the "pretentious" issue) have chosen for the honor of a Webby nomination. Chances are you haven't heard of many of the sites they pick; that doesn't bother the Webby folks.
The Webbys didn't really bother me, though, until this year's nominations came out with a surprising omission. "Suck," the most engaging site on the web, had been quietly snubbed to make room for trendier (and more asinine) nominees. In response to this injustice, I'm making Suck.com my choice for "The Best Web Site You're Not Watching."
Why didn't Suck get nominated? One problem is that the site doesn't spend any time campaigning for itself. A case in point came recently when I e-mailed the Suck staff about the Webbys fiasco, asking if they preferred a rebellious write-in vote for Suck in the "Humor" or "Print/Zines" category -- they've been nominated before in both.
An editor, Tim Cavanaugh, responded that he was no big fan of the Webbys either, but that my write-in would be better spent on freelori.org, a non-profit activism site. The self-effacement was typical. (The sentimentality was not.)
A more significant factor in Suck's snub was the fact that it relies on an old and un-hip principle -- content is king. Every weekday, the site is updated with commentary essays. The topic is often related to media in the Internet age, but social trends and politics are fair game, too. And then there's the occasional completely irrelevant humor piece.
Suck has followed the same routine since 1995. An essay every day. "Filler," a consistently funny cartoon soapbox for the consistently irritated "Polly Esther" (AKA Suck editor Heather Havrilesky), runs on Wednesday. Thursdays are always "Hit & Run," a collection of small criticisms on anything the Sucksters feel hasn't been sufficiently derided. Fridays usually bring a feature. Week after week, the same grind.
Sounds tedious, doesn't it? It is, if you don't bother to read it. Suck doesn't even make it easy for you to do that much, presenting its content in a tiny column running down the middle of the screen. To read the essays, you have to keep scrolling, which means you have to be actively involved in what's on your screen.
Scrolling is a pain, and most sites try to avoid forcing it upon the reader, let alone in such an obvious manner. Suck's creators do it because it wants you to pay attention; they're presenting quality goods. A click on the "Contributor Index" reveals a long list of writers, many from publications you've probably heard of.
The scrolling trick also reveals another aspect of Suck -- it's purposely well-suited to the Web. The essays are chock-full of hyperlinks, those blue underlined words that the surfer's mouse instinctively gravitates toward. Reading an essay turns into a project as you wander through related sites (and often through the Suck archives, an addictive habit -- the Filler page is worse than nicotine).
Whether the hyperlinks are informational or humorous, they're designed for a short attention span, another Web-savvy idiosyncrasy. Other surfer-friendly features include the Terry Colon cartoons sprinkled lightly throughout the essays and heavily throughout Filler, which is 90 percent comics.
The irony is that traditionally, the pairing of such intellectual content with this twitch factor would be unheard of. But the Web isn't traditional, and the new rules say that you showcase your content is by showcasing everyone else's (hence the success of Yahoo!).
Suck knows that its readers don't like to stay in one place for a long time, so the site accommodates them. Although it's done out of necessity, the end result is that you're more interested in what you're reading.
So if you've made it this far, congratulations -- you're overqualified to read Suck. If you skipped to the last paragraph to see what I think of the site without actually going through the entire article, then you're an ideal Suck reader.
And even if you're just flipping through on your way to the comics page, take a look at Suck -- today's Filler day.
Suck: http://www.suck.com. The Webby Awards: http://www.webbyawards.com.
