Slashdot Mirror
Net Cemetery
Ant wrote to us regarding coverage of the .com dead - the Net Cemetery. It's a fun piece, which gets into the problems of covering and reviewing a medium that's changing everyday. If you're into wandering through the .com wasteland, you should also check out Ghost Sites, which does a great job of "museumifing" (sounds like transmorgify) the same type of sites.
As much as I hate the whole dot-com market overreaction and all, what were some of these people thinking?
zoza.com? What do you think of when you heard 'zoza.com'. That's right, absofuckinglutely nothing.
bigwords.com. what's their motto, 'tired of only being able to buy a vowel?' your guide to antidisestablishmentarianism? helping you recover from Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanicconiosis? Who cares now, they've been
Floccipoccinihilipilificated.
carorder.com, because not only do you want to buy your car online, you want to buy it from someplace you've never heard of before.
elingo.com, for all your jargon needs!
icecreamvan.com. no, i'm not kidding.
popawheelie.com, because popping wheelies in real life is dangerous, and in potential violation of traffic laws.
while nobody here likes high unemployment in the tech sector, the fact of the matter is, it's not exactly shocking that most of these places died, nor is it particularly sad to see most of them go.
--
Slashdot's parent is about to go under.
We'll be mourning or ridiculing that one too
in no time.
Reel.com is on the list. Pay 'em a visit at www.reel.com/reel. asp and see if they're dead yet.
*shrug*
Aside from that, it's impressive how many of these companies went belly up... and it's FAR from a complete listing. Of course, now the industry as a whole is getting swamped by newly-unemployed job candidates, venture capital has dried up, and all the suriving companies are either taking cost-saving measures or are clinging onto life. I know it's fun to laugh at this stuff, but even for the seemingly secure working professionals out there, this changes the face of the industry for a while, and not for the better.
Makes me wish I skipped college to get in on the speculative bubble. (Don't flame saying I shouldn't have wished that - cause I got flamed last week for saying that my college education was very solid, because I don't have all the practical skills that someone from a "Learn Java Quick" course has)...
Sure, there might have been a few .coms that literally burnt money, but...
Also, on F*ckedCompany during the last month, the hardest hit companies are online metal companies. Yes, people selling iron, aluminium, nickel and whatnot. Maybe this is because people who buy metal (do you?) just kept on using their local scrapyard?
There's a lot of rubbish on the net. We all know it. We know there's lots of absolute rubbish. But in the same way that that archaeologists get really excited about unearthing ancient rubbish pits and have wonderful skills at pulling together information from them to find out about real lives from history, who knows what the dead websites of today will provide for information gatherers of tomorrow?
We can't tell what the future will want to look at from our present. Right now we're not even saving the good stuff. We need to seriously think about archiving up the web for future generations. I was one of a team of four people who built Virgin Music Group's first website back in 94- 95. Did we keep any of it? did we ***! Bit of a shame really.
Ask your local archivist or archaeologist or local historian if they think anything is too small to be of use when researching the past.
... although maybe harder to track, would be a museum of what might be called zombie-baby sites. These are pages that reach some very early stage of development -- lots of "coming soon" and occasionally even still those cheesy "under construction" icons -- and then just stop. And yet they don't actually go away, which is the weird thing: someone's paying for the hosting, but not doing anything with it.
I'm not into the idea that a page has to change all the time to be worthwhile -- for a lot of businesses, I think updates once a year or so are fine. But unfinished pages (either commercial or personal) with Last Modified dates of, say, 1997 really puzzle me.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
How is this different than any of the other sites out there, like FuckedCompany.com?
This ties is well with Story of the Pnuematic tubes, a highly developed system that disappeared and became utterly forgotten because of other systems that were utterly superior to it. (Telephones. fax, etc.)
I also am fascinated by the Athenian "computer" that ran the old Athenian democracy. (see info here in 5 parts: 1,2,3,4,5) It was far more IT intensive than most folks realize.
So with these dead sites, etc the question comes to mind: What replaces the internet when it is over?
My vote is that the most likely course is the borgification of the world. Wireless, of course.
But of course, it could be something else as well.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
www.24-7.com
In twenty years, I'll tell my daughter all about people pouring all of their cash into pets.com and she won't believe me. How long until the world forgets about boo.com? We need a place to wander the halls and say "remember them? I was so glad when they went under."
Of course, it's the semi-pro non-profit sites that will survive this collapse with cockroach-like aplomb.