Gems of the Web: Bestsnow.net

Tony Crocker's 'Bestsnow.net' is another all-substance, no-style labor of love that I am putting forth as an old school gem of the web. Written in simple, iframe-era HTML with no appreciation or ambition for the aesthetic of web 2.0 or the intriguing possibilities of data-visualization with something as palpably measurable and comparable as snowfall, Crocker has built a dogged and complete curation of North American ski resort snowfall data going back to the late 1990s (which, judging by the look, is the first and last time the site itself experienced any design work).

Clearly Tony and I have few things in common: a passion for skiing and fascination with weather and data. He's created a resource here that I would probably want to create myself if it didn't already exist. The painstaking data collection itself is one thing: accurate, organized and, I would suspect, mostly manually curated from a wild variety of sources as I don't think there's a lot of RSS of snowfall data going on. But there's also the analysis from a skier's point of view with a candid account of the what matters to the people seeking this kind of information: powder.