There's a lot of excitement in the offices of Krinklecorp this week. The staff of Ian's Website and the multinational corporation that owns the rights to the home-grown Internet sensation are celebrating a new stage in the popularity and influence of the plucky little site. What's the big deal? They have just realized that Ian's Website is now listed on Google, the Top Search Engine of 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, and 2001, according to the Internet news magazine Splinterweb. This achievement means more hits, more links from other pages, and a broader visitor base than was ever before possible. So don't be surprised to when those trendy "IANTERNET" shirts worn by young hipsters from Central Florida show up on the streets of Bejing, Melbourne, Tokyo, Cairo, or even Peru. Top executives at Krinklecorp have said that this is "a very exciting time for Ian's Website" and that "lots of people are going to be helped out by this turn of events, and that's what it's really about--people."
What does this new development mean for you? Well, if you're affluent enough to have access to a computer and the Internet, you can easily visit Ian's Website any time, without even having to know the URL! Let's say you're walking down the street in Portland, Maine, and you want to know what's happening to Ian Vandewalker in Tucson. You're not going to be able to find a recent copy of the Tucson Citizen or the Arizona Daily Star anywhere! Even if you could, it is very unlikely that either of those newspapers would report on anything Ian Vandewalker might be doing. You could pick up a phone and try to call Ian. But who wants to remember long phone numbers or pay outrageous long distance charges? Instead, you could easily pop in a cyber cafe, go to Google's website, type in a simple search string and BAM! you'll see a link to Ian's Website. You're probably wondering just how easy it is to search for Ian's Website on the Internet. Well, a search for, say, "David Duchovny" or "parody news satire" would theoretically bring up Ian's Website, but with a relatively low relevancy among thousands of hits. It's better to use exact phrases from the current home page, like "there's a-gonna be a lot more gun slingin,'" or words unique to the site, like "krinklyman," which appears in the URL, but--ironically--nowhere in the text of the actual website. A search for the exact phrase "Ian Vandewalker" doesn't yield Ian's Website, of course, although it will provide a few other hits that are genuinely about the smalltown webmaster.
The government of the United States has been hoping in vain that no one would notice how much of a bad idea its current war is, but many individuals and groups around the world are able to clearly see that it is a profoundly wrong undertaking that is only going to bring horrible consequences down on people all over the globe. In fact, the war registers extremely high on both of the University of Michigan's major scales of wrongness. The war gets a 17.2 (out of a possible 17.5 points) on the older, more distinguished Revised Scale of a Feeling of Wrongness From the Conviction That People Have a Right Not to Get Screwed Over, and a 9.7 (out 10) on the more contemporary Scale of Bad Consequences. President Bush responded to the findings in a radio address over the weekend, saying that his top advisors have told him over and over that American foreign policy has consistently been "very bad" in the past, and that he sees no reason to change that. Check out Peace Protest Net, World Protest Roundup, indymedia.org, and The Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace.
Visitors to Ian's Website still don't get why its Geocities ID is "krinklyman." There's nothing about anything being krinkly anywhere on the site, only allusions in the name of the fake company that sells hilarious better-living products on the popular Krinkle Industries page and in a completely unexplained reference to "Krinklecorp" on a recent Headlines page. "It's very confusing," said Matt Grieco, a longtime fan of the site. Inquiries to the staff of Ian's Website only direct one to the Classic Ian's Website index page with its irritating rhetoric about not being able to understand everything. There has been talk in the industry recently that Ian's Website will offer a Frequently Asked Questions page in the near future, but representatives of the site will neither confirm nor deny the rumor.