From the silly to the sublime… it seems the Internet brings out people’s interest in Meta-Content whether it’s Slate or Brill’s Content in my bookmarks, or any of the other media analyses on the web, everyone wants to explain everything to everyone else.

This trend isn’t so surprising, but what is surprising is how little of this content refers to the web itself. But of course the point of today’s rant is that there are now self-referential web reviews, the first of which has tickled my fancy for quite some time: GhostSites. It’s an archive/homage to sites which have been abandoned by their creators, muddling along in HTML purgatory optimized for browsers which have long been superceded. And it’s funny, too.

A little more geeky and less accessible is Area 404. If you don’t know, 404 is the generic error message a server would spit out to your web browser if the URL referenced a page that doesn’t exist. Being exceedingly unhelpful, the 404 on most sites these days has been replaced by (somewhat) helpful custom error pages. And herein lies the charm of Area 404, documenting the best, worst, funniest, and strangest of the 404 errors on the web. Cool!