Published in AustralianIT, May 27 2003

AS a child, I went through a brief phase of collecting food colouring.

Naturally, this made me even more of an isolated freak than I already was. In the internet era, though, I wouldn't have been alone with my unusual hobby for long.

A quick scan round a search engine would soon have made me acquainted with other people indulging in this decidedly odd occupation.

Or so the conventional wisdom goes. A fairly thorough internet search suggests that, in fact, nobody else on the entire planet has ever seriously contemplated collecting food colouring (bottle collectors provide the closest parallel).

Odd sites Insulators From Australia: http://www3.turboweb.net.au/~plowe/insulators/welcome.htm Insulator Collectors On The Net: http://www.insulators.com Findavon: http://www.findavon.com Lunch Box Pad: http://www.lunchboxpad.com/ Mr Wrigglehead's Lunchbox Gallery: http://www.cybermad.com/culture/wobble/wobble.html Bread Tags Collector: http://www.geocities.com/transactoid/tags.html

That may be because they're too busy indulging in other equally odd hobbies and boasting about them online.

Peter Lowe, who resides in northern NSW, is Australia's most visible online collector of glass insulators.

Insulators are used on telegraph and telephone lines and became a popular collecting item sometime in the 1960s.

Without the internet, it's likely insulator collectors such as Lowe would have remained somewhat out-of-touch. But on the net today there are more than 2000 insulator collectors worldwide. (Lowe is no stranger to unusual hobbies; his other hobbies include collecting licence plates and British car wiring diagrams from 1945 to 1949.)

Scarily, the number of Avon collectors worldwide seems even larger than the insulator crowd (we just hope they don't trade decades-old face cream.)

If you're among them, and have been secretly worrying that your set of kitschy collector dolls and plates from Avon is strangely incomplete, don't panic.

Findavon.com offers an extensive selection of older Avon products, as well as basic information on the National Association of Avon Collectors. Oddly, this group boasts that it has virtually no internet presence.

Collectors will never actually use the items they collect, but occasionally it's nice to think this is possible.

That represents one possible justification for the otherwise slightly bizarre habit of collecting lunch boxes, though the more probable explanation is a feeling of vague nostalgia for sitting around in the playground eating soggy tomato sandwiches.

The key website for such users is Lunch Box Pad, while a fine selection of celebrity lunch boxes can be viewed at Mr Wrigglehead's Lunchbox Gallery.

People with unusual hobbies will invariably be mocked by the outside world, and this rule holds true on the internet as well.

One of the best known satires is the Bread Tags Collector site, which contains a set of insanely detailed statistics on an alleged collection of bread tags as well as lots of arcane collector lingo: "Upon initially discovering the presence of a new bread tag, the bread tag is removed and placed into the Bread Tag Collection Receptacle, or, the BTCR; otherwise known as my pocket."