Mormons won't cross the street until I eat a candied yam. We're seeing legions of self-appointed critics, humorists, and performers. Both of these sites offer users the experience of reading a smart, off-center magazine, but one they can sample in small doses. They invite the reader into sharing a skewed, intellectual view of the world. But part of their joy is in their cult flavor.
Readers can feel they've made a discovery and got there ahead of the crowd.
But the crowd has very definitely arrived at one funny Web site. A week after we went on the Web, we took off. The site currently gets more than a million hits a week and has spawned hundreds of imitations. The Onion is a parody newspaper that covers both cosmic international events and minuscule local ones with the same anchor-man omnipotence. One reason for its success on the Web is that Onion headlines stand alone as gags.