A <pedant> writes </pedant>

What the web does not need is another web commentator.

Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.

The web has neither wants nor needs. The web just sits there. You or I have wants and needs - we may project them onto the web, but as soon as we do, we must be careful not to forget what the web is. The web is the sum total of what people have put there at any one time, no more and no less.

Experienced browsers will have regions of the web that they know very well, whether technical, professional, personal, informational, local, educational or creative. The more specialised the subject, the more likely an individual is to 'know' a significant fraction of the sites dealing with it. Similiarly, the more popular a subject is, the less likely any one person is to be 'on top' of everything that is out there, since it will proliferate beyond the bounds of such possibility.

Inexperienced browsers spend time looking at sites recommended to them by people or organisations they trust. This is why ISPs and OSPs need to take such care with their own sites - they have great power over their inexperienced customers and must be sure to direct them to 'places worth going' if they are to keep their custom. These 'places worth going' cannot necessarily be predicted, which is why those in the business of online content provision must make sure they are continually aware, at least vaguely, of what everybody else thinks. To find out what everybody else thinks is not an exact science, and is based on some complicated formula involving a subset of that peculiarly unique genre of websites - web commentary, whether overt or otherwise.

Overt web commentary consists of people online saying what they think about what is online. The memes are batted back and forth like a million simultaneous games of Pong and the ones that survive have a recursive effect on the way that people build things. The ones that don't survive, by definition, are the ones that have no such impact. However, not all web commentary is overt.

While the body of the web is the simple aggregate of the sites online at any given time, its soul is the organic relationship between this body and the people interacting with it, and how that changes over time. It is this soul that some people refer to more or less guardedly as the part of the web which may in some way approximate a model of consciousness; it is this soul that makes the web far more exciting than it is cool to admit to. The soul is enriched each time another person chooses to join a set of pages of their own onto what is already there. It makes the gestalt entity that is the web as a whole that bit more accurate a reflection of the entity that is the human population as a whole.

Since the soul of the web in this model is composed of precisely the recursive element - the way the web evolves over time - it follows that every single site on the web is, in a sense, web commentary. Every site, no matter how constructed, has the potential to influence the way other sites are constructed.

To claim that the web does not need another web commentator is therefore wrong. Web commentary is an inevitable part of the web. No site can be constructed without making a number of clear ideological statements one way or another about a number of issues. The fact that a wave of commercialisation has created a large volume of sites where these statements are things like 'Consume', 'Marry and Reproduce', and 'Maintain the Status Quo' is reason for more web commentary, not less. But we sleep...