Keith Gordon snarfs for Markeroni. Now before you get all fidgety and call the police, you should know that Gordon's hobby is as wholesome and above-board as weekend fun can be: He takes pictures of historic markers and landmarks and posts them on the Internet.

He's a member of www.markeroni.com, a site where users can catalog what they've seen.

"It's a lot of fun," said Gordon, 37, who logs in as "WanderingRaleighite" and has more than 250 snarfs -- visits to markers and landmarks -- to his credit. "It's somewhat addictive."

With all your hurrying, it's possible that your visits to historic markers center on whatever you can read as the car whizzes by. But a growing number of people are turning those markers into a full-on hobby, using sites such as Markeroni and www.waymarking.com as places to keep track of their trips and to converse with like-minded connoisseurs of the abbreviated history lesson.

For Gordon, his historic-marker journey dovetails with a couple of other hobbies -- 10-kilometer walks and letterboxing, in which treasure hunters find hidden notebooks and mark them with rubber stamps. "I'm not one for going to the beach and lying around all day," he said.

Chuck Rodgers and his brother-in-law Mike McCullock started www.highwaymarker.org about five years ago. The men, who live in Person County and work in Hillsborough, are closing in on 2,000 entries on their site. They've done most of the picture-taking and logging themselves, which includes about 450 North Carolina sites.

Rodgers owns a company, Bay Data Inc., that provides computer consulting for associations and nonprofits. McCullock works with him, and the two plan their business trips so they can pick up more markers. Guidebooks are available for those who are looking to explore. "It's just kind of fun looking for the markers," said Rodgers, 44.

"Oh, in the back of your head you're thinking, 'hey -- maybe someone would pay us for this.' That's a big pipe dream," he said, laughing.

There are 1,495 official state historic markers in North Carolina, said Michael Hill, research supervisor for the N.C. Office of Archives and History. A committee meets twice each year to discuss proposals for new markers, and 12 to 15 are installed annually.

Before the end of the year, Hill hopes to have a state-marker Web site up and running. Pictures, essays and bibliographies are planned so that people can not only see the markers, but learn a little something, too.

"Markers fascinate people," he said. "It's history in your backyard."

Markeroni founder Linda Gentile remembers exploring the past as a child. "I grew up with history," said Gentile, who lives in California but was born in England to parents who liked to travel. "Some of my earliest memories are of crawling around ancient burial mounds."

So far, there are nearly 60,000 landmarks in the Markeroni database that people can find. Members have logged close to 6,000 visits. Highway markers, landmarks, war memorials and historic buildings are included. "It's fairly loose," she said. "It's whatever people want to find, almost."

Although members can participate in a Markeroni Challenge -- in which members challenge themselves to visit a certain number of landmarks and markers in a calendar year -- the site is not designed for competition.

"It's more of a place where you can log your own journey," she said.

It might seem odd that a woman from Yorkshire, England, spends so much time logging American landmarks. But Gentile, who recently spent three weeks traveling Nevada and logged 200 new entries, doesn't see it that way.

"I think history is history, no matter where you are."