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Are web spiders eating up the ugly?
Have you ever wandered into a home-grown market - where the sights, smells, produce and textures were unique to that corner of the world?
It's loud, it's a bit disorganised and there's an awful lot of hectic haggling happening down there at the stalls.

Think of the internet as a global community, in all its diversity. If you were to take a walk down the streets of this community, what would you find?

The net is definitely becoming prettier. Templates are sophisticated, colours are subdued and inoffensive, design understated, content measured for the correct percentage of keywords, and any site owner worth their page rank is rigidly conforming to the web standards and all of the associated googleology. It's all very smooth and efficient.

But I for one would be sorely disappointed if all of the colour and chaos ever disappeared from the web. Sometimes I just wanna see ugly...
myspace.com is ugly. Kind of like city back-streets with noisy over-crowded cafes, buskers, grimy graffiti on the walls, overflowing garbage, and doof-doof music permeating the air.
People want to hang there. It's got atmosphere.
Maybe you won't want to hang there all the time. Maybe you'll grow out of it. But it's nice to know it's there.

I once came across a website about ants. Lime-green background, text that hit you between the eyes, and some nifty animated ants that I think he'd drawn himself. He was passionate about ants and his website took me back to a time in my childhood when the thought of having my own antfarm was right up there with the dream of having my own Sea-Monkey kingdom.

I hope there'll always be room for the passionate, the home-grown, the organic, and the just plain ugly on the net. It would be a sad day if the web ever succeeded in having its spiders eat all the loud and the lime-green.

Originally published at Quassia