IN THE SIX YEARS since the World Wide Web became an honest-to-gosh phenom with the first NSCA Mosaic browser, a helluva lotta buzzwords and hype schemes have vied to become the next Big Online Thing, with all the resultant news articles and magazine covers and venture capital and stock offerings.

A lot of these would-be cyber-smashes have failed to live up to their advance publicity. (Remember “push media”? Virtual communities? Sidewalk.com and the Microsoft Network “shows” concept? WebTV?)

About nine months ago, the catchword was “Portal.” Big commercially-run websites were going to gather banner-ad-viewin’ eyeballs (and demographic-database stats about those sets of eyeballs) by virtually being everything to everyone. Not by having all the content any Web user’d wanna look at, but by having organized directories of links to all that stuff.

The “portal” sites were going to be the new gatekeepers, collecting indirect “tolls” in the form of ad revenues from anybody who wanted to find anything on the Web, even directly charging big corporate Websites for prominent mentions on the portal pages. Netscape was going to use its browser as a loss leader, to make dough from its portal site.

Advocates of an open-access Web even issued dire fears that the more corporately-minded portals, such as MSN and AOL, might abuse the massive control over searchin’ and browsin’ everybody thought they were bound to attain.

Hasn’t quite happened that way.

The Disney/Infoseek/Starwave consortium, f’rinstance, was going to have promoted its Go Network as the one-and-only place users had to go to to find anything (and whose own in-house sites would be the prime recommended source for most of that “anything”). Now, it’s redirecting its promotion toward the individual sites beneath the Go flag (ESPN.com, Mr. Showbiz, et al.).

Yahoo! has found the portal biz insufficient to keep the ol’ stock price up, and has been rapidly trying to expand into almost every conceivable Web-based operation other than porn or gambling.

The one-size-fits-all portals aren’t going away (at least not the better-funded ones). But they’re not gonna become the all-powerful “netcenters” either.

Indeed, reports last week claim they can’t even keep their search engines up to speed with the ever-expanding explosion of Web content out there.

Exit the portal as the big cyber-hype.

Enter the Weblog.

Small (often one-person or volunteer operations), specialized (either by topic or by the operator’s personal tastes), convenient (usually just one page per site), Weblogs are neither webzines (which emphasize original content), nor automated search engines, nor all-purpose portals.

They’re collections of hand-picked links to pages on other sites, curated to either service afficianados of a particular topic (movies, the Microsoft lawsuit, health care, etc.) or to express the curator’s personality via insights into the curator’s current obsessions.

Weblogs differ from the older style of link pages because, instead of merely listing ongoing links to whole sites, Weblogs link to specific articles, essays, or sections on those other sites. Many Weblog operators update their links every damn day (in some cases, even on the weekends).

Think of it as the Net equivalent of musical sampling. Only there’s no copyright-infringement issues, ’cause the Weblog operators quote no more than “fair use” excerpts from the linked-to pages.

Also think of it as one more stage in the ever-increasing bifurcation and “tribalization” of the Web, and of society at large.

A few Weblogs to start your exploration:

• Offhand Remarks (Net-centric and terse).
• Camworld by Cameron Barrett (a few well-chosen links per day and a standing list of over 60 other Weblogs and Newslogs (Weblogs linking primarily to news articles)).
• Rebecca’s Pocket by Seattle-based Rebecca Blood (notes and comment on everything from animal testing to bras with built-in electronic alarms).
• Eatonweb by Brigitte Eaton (slow-loading, small-font listings, emphasizing web-design topics; plus nearly 100 links to other Weblogs).
• Obscure Store and Reading Room by Jim Romenesko (one of the best Newslogs, from a print-zine veteran; includes general links to some 20 Weblogs and dozens of news sites).
• Have Browser, Will Travel by Jim Roepcke of Victoria (specialties include Macintosh and hockey).
• Saturn.org by Jack Saturn (well-written condensations of the articles being linked to, if you can read on the dark burnt-orange background).
• The Stuffed Dog by David Adams (long, thorough condensations of the articles being linked to, mostly Net-business-oriented).
• Windowseat Weblog by Lauren Krahn (TV/entertainment links).
• Robot Wisdom by Jorn Barger (extensive links on Web programming, music, world affairs, and the infamous JenniCam).
• Cardhouse by Scott Berk and friends (links on odd chewing gums, game shows, dorky politicians, cool conceptual art, and other really important things).
• Scripting News by Dave Winer, whose Frontier scripting software is used by many weblog programmers. Includes a handy article attempting to answer the question, “What Is A Weblog?”

MONDAY: This site isn’t a Weblog, at least not yet, but the next installment will explore more wackiness from across the Net.