A few days ago, I discussed one of my favorite formulas for a successful web site, which I’ll here dub the Bonsai Kitten technique: find a politically charged topic (i.e. animal abuse), create an utterly distasteful concept leveraging that topic (using glass jars to ‘shape’ growing kittens), then build a site espousing the idea, tinged with just enough tongue-in-cheekness to allow people to realize (or perhaps just hope) that the hole thing must be a farce.

Today, however, I’d like to highlight another, equally amusing, site genre: sites built on a bizarre fascination with the inane. The undisputed king of this realm: the Condiment Museum, featuring literally hundreds of little condiment packets from around the globe carefully collected, photographed and organized. A solid up-and-comer in the space is the Do Not Eat Page, dedicated to the eponymously inscribed desiccant packets found in electronics boxes and jacket pockets. And, of course, there’s the “this guy needs mental help” leader of the genre, Graham Barker’s Navel Fluff Page, which, regrettably, more or less lives up to its name.

So, if you’re looking for fame and fortune on the Internet (actually, not so much the fortune part, and likely not much fame either, but I digress), simply develop a fixation on something with utterly no value and build up a site to evangelize your bizarre obsession. Then email me about it; for some reason, I find these sites to be oddly compelling.