Okay, I’m still on my webring hobby horse.
Of all the ring hosts, the now defunct Bomis was the most different. A Bomis ring owner didn’t have to wait for webmasters to apply to join the ring. The ring owner could just add sites he/she found relevant. Navigation was by IFrame so a site did not need to have a ringcode on it. In effect, it made the Bomis ring owner a mini directory editor. One could make some pretty cool rings with Bomis. If I remember right you could even search the ring from Bomis.
The important thing is not Bomis, but the way you could catalog the web with Bomis. This is an idea that may have some merit today for things like blog discovery.
The down side was the ringcodes from Bomis (for those sites that applied to be added) were as plain-jane as a white washing machine. IOW, boring at a time when cool ringcodes were big and gaudy. Not having ringcodes on every site made it hard to attract new members to a ring. Plus Bomis had a slightly naughty reputation of being a place for bikini babes and then over time got even more naughty, which turned a lot of people off.
Still, without Bomis there would be no Wikipedia.
