The World of Stuff .com

Interview: Christian Shelton and Scott Atwood

Fri Oct 07, 2005 12:46 (UTC -5)

In my 500th post last month, I brainstormed ideas to improve The World of Stuff. One of them was interviews. Now, I present to you the first monthly interview. Hopefully it should appear the first Friday of each month. Easy to remember, right?

If you haven’t heard of Christian and Scott’s Interactive Top Ten List, you’re missing out on a semiweekly source of humor remniscent of the good old days of the web. On this site, which has been run by Christian Shelton and Scott Atwood for ten years, users submit suggestions for humorous top ten lists, and then C & S sort through the users’ funniest list entries. There were some things I wanted to know about the web site, so they set the record straight.

The World of Stuff: What was your motivation for starting the site?

Christian Shelton: We were roommates at college and both CS majors, so as a fun project, we decided to set up one of our computers as a linux machine. In 1995, it wasn’t quite as simple as now. (It involved a cart-load of floppy disks and a number of kernel recompilations.) We felt pretty pleased when it booted and we could run a stable web server from it. We then started to brainstorm about websites we could create that would generate hits. We figured that the content had to change, otherwise people wouldn’t return and the idea of user submissions to top ten lists popped into our heads.

Scott Atwood: We began our Top Ten list in the early days of the World Wide Web. We wanted to create a site that would be entertaining and with ever changing content to keep users coming back for more. We didn’t have the time as students to come up with all new material ourselves every week, so we came up with the concept of the interactive top ten list.

TWoS: Why are you still doing it?

SA: People are still reading it! It doesn’t take much time and effort on our part to keep it up and running and it brings a smile to my face every week.

CS: There is certainly some inertia behind it; it would be sad to stop at this point. But mainly, I think we enjoy the humor it provides. It adds to the web the kind of content we feel should be there.

When we started, Yahoo had only just begun and search engines like Google did not exist. The web was “deep” and not “broad:” people’s web pages linked to other things they liked and there were no real “directories” or “one stop surfing” sites. “Surfing the web” was done by following one interesting link to another until you found yourself at information or entertainment you hadn’t even known you were looking for.

I think this website is a bit of a throw-back to those days. The page is straight-forward. It doesn’t have a monetary agenda. It has a “home spun” feel. I like running such a website.

TWoS: What duties have you divvied among yourselves? In other words, who does what?

CS: The server is run jointly by both of us. Some duties are allocated to one of us or another (like file system backups or web server maintenance) but for the most part we try to make sure either of us can take care of any issues that might arise.

The selection of the list alternates between the two of us, with one person taking Mondays and the other Thursdays. There are exceptions, of course, to deal with travel and work schedules.

SA: Each of us edits one list per week. Whenever one of us is on vacation, the other will edit all the lists. In over ten years of running the top ten list, we’ve only had to have a guest editor (Christian’s sister) once when both of us were unavailable.

TWoS: The design of your site is very simple, yet the style changes regularly. What has motivated you to keep the same basic design after all these years?

SA: Two reasons: it works and we’re lazy! We change the style from time to time to keep the site looking fresh. But we see no compelling reason to change the basic design, since the concept itself is so simple.

CS: I advocate the idea of HTML as a content-description language and not a page-layout language. I understand why it has gone in the direction of page-layout, but I feel it is best as a marker of the type of information and now how to display it. The basic format has worked well and I haven’t seen a need to change it. We still use the same perl scripts as we did 10 years ago to collect the submissions. I think a design change would also take us away from the “old school” feel of the website that I like.

TWoS: I had several lists and top ten submissions accepted years ago (under the moniker “Slowpoke”), but I included a link to my site in the “Name” field. Since then I’ve had no luck with getting picked. Do you block annoying users, or am I just not trying as hard?

SA: When editing the list each week, I begin by selecting the 20-40 funniest entries out of the hundreds we receive. I don’t look at the submitter’s names at all. I then begin ordering the entries and narrowing it down to the ten funniest. When the list is more or less finished, I may check the submitter’s names to make sure a single person isn’t overly represented in the final list.

We absolutely do not play favorites, nor block users. Some of the submitters submit a lot of entries, and some have a sense of humor that more closely resembles that of our own.

CS: We do not block any submitters. When we select the entries, a program lets us pick the top ten without seeing the names. The names are then matched up with the submissions at the end. It is always hard to say why certain people have or don’t have success. I think it has more to do with how well their sense of humor aligns with ours, and those things tend to change with time.

TWoS: On your site you say that there are too many funny ones to easily narrow it down to ten. Are there any particularly funny entries or list suggestions that you wish you hadn’t left out?

CS: I don’t recall any particular submissions at this point. After almost a thousand lists, it is hard to remember all the details of each selection. However, I do often read an old list and think “gee, that one isn’t as funny to me any more.” Sometimes something will seem hilarious on a Monday or Thursday morning, but will lose some of its appeal later. Humor always depends on context and so each list “ages” differently.

But, to answer your question more directly, usually, it is simple to narrow it down to 15-30 good entries. After that it is very hard. The last few that get cut could often have made the 10th spot on a different day.

SA: Some weeks I wish we had a Top Eleven or Top Fifteen List. Other weeks I feel like I can barely scrape together a Top Nine that makes me happy.

Of course there are funny tidbits that I wish I could have shared, but ten is a nice round number that makes for a nice dose of humor.

Christian Shelton and Scott Atwood have run Christian and Scott’s Interactive Top Ten List since 1995.