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Archive Team Is Busy Saving Geocities
jamie found this note from Jason Scott, who organizes the Archive Team. They are busy downloading as much of Geocities as they can before it vanishes from the Net after Yahoo pulled the plug. (Note: that textfiles.com link is a good candidate for Readability.) "..after 48 hours of work, Archive Team has saved over 200,000 Geocities sites. We're now pulling in new sites at the rate of something like 5 a second. Is that fast enough? We'll see, won't we. ... A side-effect of the whole process is I now know way, way, way too much [sic] about Geocities than I ever expected to. We've had to dissect every aspect of how the site functions to understand how to mirror things, from its history through how it does crazy javascript ads. Some of it is stupid and some is hilarious... We think we have most every site from 1999 and before on Geocities that was left. ... It is more important to me to grab the data than to figure out how to serve it later. People who have been talking about copyright and stuff seem to think I'm going to sell it or take credit or some crap. I don't see how the final collection won't end up online, but how is elusive — maybe a torrent of a bunch of zip files, or as a curated collection, or as a bunch of hard drives. However it is, I'll make sure people can get it, somehow."
With Google losing half a billion a year, how long until they pull the plug on Youtube? I guess it could turn a profit, but when? My guess is the next downturn will cause shareholder pressure to force their hand.
Isn't anybody going to move a finger, while a significant part of our collective history disappears forever?
I really don't think anyone should be allowed to simply pull the plug, no matter what TOS say.
If I buy the Colosseum and then decide to blow it up "because it's mine", I bet I'd be stopped by someone, rightly so.
As a historian of year 2075, I'd really want to have access to Geocities if I am researching the '90s.
It happened at least once before. In the 50's and early 60's, video storage technology was expensive, and most video documentation was not not considered to be of any 'historical value'. As a result, most of it was just erased and we have lost forever an incredible source of information on that period.
Is there a productive way to scream? A petition of some kind? An attorney to be addressed?
"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong." (Oscar Wilde)
This is just ridiculous the amount of work they have to go through to half ass archive geocities. Why can't yahoo just hand over a stack of hard drives to archive.org or someone?
I was 18 and it wasn't half bad as you say. There might be a lot of important information there to archive and we should help them if we can.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
>I was a Boy Scout, and relying on some free service without thinking of contingencies just doesn't make sense.
Sounds kind of like the argument against Web Apps ...
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
Because of course, we know they'll never adapt, they'll never innovate, right?
I mean, it's only Google. It's not like there's any smart people involved. What have they ever done?
Sometimes, I tire of intellectual midgets.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That would eliminate a whole lot of what we call "progress" in technology and culture.
Sometimes, you don't realize something is "broken" until somebody comes along and "fixes" it.
Know what? I like people who fix what isn't broken.
Though aimlessly adopting any new technology that comes along isn't progress.
I'm appending a list of browser features mutilated by web 2.0:
When every webpage has it's own conventions for what happens when you press a key, you haven't moved forward, you've moved into chaos. Nowadays, what happens when you press a key or click on an element is an entirely arbitrary matter in the hands of the website designer, and completely different from site to site.
Navigating webpages used to be difficult enough when all links were immediately available. Now, adding to the pain, you have to search page elements that are only loaded if you perform some arcane voodoo ritual that the designer figured decided was how the page elements should work.
It's not that web 2.0 pages have a new interface that's different from the old, it's that every single web 2.0 page has it's own conventions.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The Nested display was totally broken for long topics (if the thread tree got too big, each additional page would just be a repeat of the previous page). At least now it's just really slow on big topics. And you have to keep hitting more till you actually load the whole discussion.
The new Slashdot interface is better than the old, all in all. The preferences popup/overlay is stupid and the moderating interface needs to go back to having a confirm moderation button but the dynamic display of remaining mod points is nice and the inline, dynamic commenting is brilliant. The ajax-driven thread expand/collapse is also good.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
You know, 40 years ago businesses with rare exception didn't have computers. There was no Internet. It took a professional typist about 10 minutes to bang out a professional letter. There were no cellular phones - hell, touch-tone wouldn't even be invented for fifteen years.
I've got more transistors in my house than existed then in all the world. I've got more storage in my desktop computer (3TB) than existed in the world at that time. I can communicate in ways that at that time were absurd speculative fiction, and would have seemed absurdly undesirable. For example, an annoying computer sends an email reminder every night at midnight to my cellular phone and I can't convince its administrator to make it stop. I could turn my cell phone into a streaming web beacon that updates my position on a world-visible map in real time and I don't actually know if it's doing that without my permission. I can stream my live first person perspective to everyone in the world bored enough to watch it. And now it takes a team of 3 most of a day to craft and deliver a professional email.
You're right. By then we may have lost the ability to communicate in the written form entirely, and lost the option to opt out. That would definitely be "more change".
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I humbly disagree that Myspace is anywhere near as useful as Geocities could be*. Or at least entertaining.
You could spend hours on interesting geocities sites devoted to a very particular subject. Anyone remember the website "Spatula City"? I think it was hosted on geocities for a time.
Then you had the websites that were kind of like mini-wikipedias for tv shows, Star Trek, the simpsons, and so on.
There was the odd personal webpage that was actually interesting (I remember "Tales from a loser" or something like that, a blog before the word even existed), links, and who could forget, "those" sites that begged you "IF YOU DON'T OWN THIS SOFTWARE ERASE IT AFTER 24HRS OTHERWISE IT'S ILLEGAL! FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY!"
90% of it was crap, but it was interesting crap. Myspace on the other hand, besides hosting the music for some bands, seems really useless to me as a host. And as a social network, Facebook is just better.
* Operative word could
I'm sorry, but that's a bit disingenuous. It took a professional typist about 10 minutes to bang out a profressional letter -that was already written-. Now it takes a team of 3 most of a day to craft and deliver a professional email, -the exact same thing you glossed over before-.
You can be harassed by an email reminder you don't want, or you could turn your damn phone off at night or set it up to be automatically deleted.
How in the world you think we're losing the ability to communicate in written form I don't quite understand.
Although, maybe you're right. No offense, but reading your poorly-reinforced argument (modded +5 insightful) is kind of an argument in itself.
It took a professional typist about 10 minutes to bang out a professional letter.
Why is this an example of advancement? Technology hasn't changed that. What's changed is that the "typist" can now send it to a recipient halfway around the world instantly, or print 100 copies in minutes. The typist still has to bang out the letter on a keyboard, same as always.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.