this-page-intentionally-left-blank.org

Imagine this: You're watching television. A stretch, but stay with me here. An announcer comes on to tell you you've been watching too much. You need to calm down, get away from all the visual stimuli. The screen fades to blank for the next 10 minutes and you watch it.

Or: You're reading The New Yorker. One of the pages has nothing on it but white space, and a tiny note that you've been reading too much searing social commentary by Nicholas Lemann, too much satire by Steve Martin. You're to look at the white space and relax.

These kinds of events are usually unintentional and called "dead air," or whatever the print version of dead air is. But the Web is a uniquely self-conscious medium. Nobody's unequivocally in favor of Web-surfing. Nobody's unequivocally in favor of TV-watching, either, except — and here's the important difference — people who work in TV.

But everyone has a website. And some of these people would like to point out that we are (they are, that's where the self-examination comes in) spending too much time on the Web. Or that the Web is not the only thing, not even the only medium, out there. Or maybe just that the Web is a medium.

So there's The Last Page of the Internet. A Day Without Weblogs. And now, taking it all one step further, we have this-page-intentionally-left-blank.org, a site devoted entirely to urging webmasters to put up blank pages on their sites in the hopes of spurring self-reflection.

Perhaps you were expecting this review itself to be blank. That would be too, too easy. But, more to the point, the TPILB-Project (as they call it) site isn't blank, so my review doesn't have to be either. The TPILB-Project engages in wispy speculation about the nature of the Web, so I get to do it too.

Unlike its predecessors — A Day Without Weblogs was about World AIDS Day, The Last Page of the Internet was a joke on the nonlinear nature of the Web — TPILB really is about what it's about, in this case, pages that proclaim themselves to be blank, in an homage to their print counterparts. "Nowadays the TPILB-Project wants to introduce these blank pages to the Web. One reason is to keep alive the remembrance of these famous historical blank pages. But the primary reason is to offer surfers a place of quietness and simplicity on the overcrowded World Wide Web — a blank page for relaxing the restless mind," the site explains.

You can join their effort by adding a blank page to your own website. Well, not a really blank page. A page that looks like this. And then you link to the page with the sentence, "This website features a Blank Page according to the recommendations of the TPILB-Project."

Could this be one massive corporate viral marketing scheme? Well, with zero members, it doesn't really qualify as "massive" yet. But maybe they're waiting for everyone to put these links on their double-noun-named blogs, then reveal their site as the corporate impostor it is. The TPILB-Project doesn't take members whose sites "contain pornographic, illegal or other unpleasant material" — and what family-friendly corporation would, right?

It's an intriguing but unlikely idea. The TPILB-Project seems to be the project of a man named Lars Kasper, who declares on his personal site that "Jakob Nielsen ist der Usability-Guru" (emphasis his.) It appears to be a genuine attempt to introduce a new fad to the Web, a new fad that will, refreshingly, make no money for anyone.

As fads go, it beats banner ads, which also arguably make no money for anyone. But it appears that the United States government may have actually anticipated this chic German import. The self-aware hipsters at the EPA, NASA, and the National Park Service all have their own intentionally blank pages, and NPS's is actually blank.

But adoption by the US government is no proof of the efficiency of an idea. If everyone creates a new blank page on their websites, that's a lot of bandwidth. So here's an idea. Get rid of the most expendable page on your website, maybe the page with all the links to your friends' homepages, or the one about your strategic e-business connections. Replace it with a blank page. Look into the emptiness, relax, and thank Lars.

— Julia Lipman (julia@flakmag.com)