GSH
Posts 431
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Remember Geocities? Those online a decade-and-a-half back probably do. No doubt many of us set up our first webpages there. I recall it almost seemed magical at the time: a place where you could make thoughts and images visible and instantly accessible to anyone anywhere in the world. It was easy. Amazingly, it was also free. It didn't seem unreasonable to think that this was something that could change the world.
Websites varied from the simple to the sophisticated. Content was limited only by the imagination. There was an abundance of trash and there was treasure. Many websites grew organically as continuously expanding personal repositories, while others were frozen little time capsules--drawers full of odds and ends that sometimes went unopened for years. Unless deliberately taken down, sites tended to remain indefinitely--until about a week ago, when Yahoo decided to unceremoniously scuttle the whole thing.
Fortunately, someone decided there might be unforeseen value to well over a decade of early internet history, and launched a crash program to salvage most of this stuff before it got deep-sixed. They actually pulled it off. A big chunk of the digital fossil record has been preserved for the time being as ReoCities. Their story of the project is an entertaining read: http://reocities.com/newhome/makingof.html
WayBack did an independent emergency crawl of most of Geocities as well, though their stuff won't be accessible for a couple of weeks.
I was surprised to find a personal website I'd begun constructing in 1997--and had added to occasionally until around 2006--as part of the ReoCities archive. Absolutely nothing had gone missing. I suppose this matters. The last time I checked, some of those pages had accumulated many thousands of hits over the years. Evidently the varied topics were of passing interest somewhere.
This all seems to me like a good thing. One of these days there will probably be cultural anthropologists interested in the early internet, studying clues about the times that people unintentionally left behind. ReoCities will leave them 800,000 individual accounts worth of random sites to study. Who knows what all is in there, or what the future might consider of interest?
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edited by GSH on 11/4/2009
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