Why do they call them sites anyway?

For years now I have been bemoaning the fact that the web is just a collection of catalogs. Now admittedly it's a very big collection and there are some pretty fancy schmancy catalogs... but still, it's all pages linked to pages. An amazing resource I said, but they're not sites in any real sense of the word. They don't deserve to be called sites in the sense of being locations anymore than a library classification code is a location.

Then I discovered Second Life and realized that the web is indeed capable of housing places that deserve to be called sites. In case you haven't been in a virtual environment, what I mean is that a page is a thing you look at, or maybe you also read it. But it's not a place that you are the way that you can be at the coffee shop or on a mountain. A page is not a site.

So then I started ranting to anyone who would listen how, now that we can make actual online places, that they would start to pop up everywhere. I declared that web 3.0 was gonna be web 3D. I was sure that the concept of an immersive environment where visitors have the experience of being in an actual place would start to leak out onto the web. Well - not so far, or at least not in any big way.

But here's one, and it's gorgeous. And I think you'll agree that although it falls a little short of providing the experience of being in a place, it's a richer, more dimensional experience than that of looking at a page.

Visit Immersive Garden

Do visit and lemme know what you think or if you know of any other websites that deserve to be called places, I would love to visit them too.