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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."
to surround it all by a blink tag
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.
I lost the password to my Geocities page 10 years ago. Think you might be able to find it?
I can see the fnords!
Yes, future generations must know about the horrors visited upon us by the millions of tubgirl and lolcats clones which populated Geocities. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
They'll be broke in only 40 years.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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)
Did you try hunter2?
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 want to make sure that any geocities site I may have been affiliated with back in my formative years is not seen by anyone who might recognize me now.
Who do I make the check out to, and how many significant places will be required?
There was an awesome amount of amateur research on Geocities. Some of my favorite reference sites are therefore just about toast (most of them containing first-hand military history).
And just because someone asked, I saved all ~300 of my Youtube favorites to my HDD last weekend, when I realized how much I rely on them for my own hobby research projects, teaching classes, etc. Most of it was stuff that will never be on DVD. Some of it is stuff that the owners have *already* deleted in the last week, due to perfectionism or whatever.
I was a Boy Scout, and relying on some free service without thinking of contingencies just doesn't make sense.
Along with people who insist on using fixed width fonts in a forum where *everybody* else uses proportional width fonts.
...to rhyme with 'atrocities' ?
I posted earlier about how Geocities was the early web 2.0 in practice, where anybody could post anything and contribute to the community. I'm sure that there is a wealth of information on geocities about obscure topics that *Might* come in handy if you were to let your true inner geek reign supreme. I.E. I have bios roms of early mac's that I found on Geocities sites that couldn't be found anywhere else, and I'm sure that if they were posted nowadays, they would be subject to lawsuits or take-down notices by Apple.
I think that our generation will leave less of a mark than that which came before it because nobody is writing on paper. Geocities is the closest thing that we have to shoe-boxes full of letters and diaries for the period spanning the late 90's (In the form of websites about star trek and software and pointless articles posted by ambitious young proto-webdesigners). In the future, there will be a similar scramble to preserve facebook and myspace to preserve correspondence for future generations.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
Angelfire was fun to snoop around on, since the image subdirectories were open for the browsing. Sometimes you found images not meant for the public.
What was that password? When you typed hunter2, all I saw was *******.
Be relentless!
"you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2" http://www.bash.org/?244321
Real men read Slashdot articles at -1, bottom up.
Here is just one example of content on Geocities that has value.
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/8682/
These old documents are still of value to people modding the old games.
If anything s mentioned in the same sentence as goatse it's quite safe to assume that it probably doesn't involve puppy dogs and kittens, at least not in the traditional sense.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
Funny, but true. I did forget my login information (email/username and password) to this site, which is just the one image.
For those who don't know, this is a parody of Chick religious tracts (God, what a waste of a domain name!) that has often been the target of the Chick lawyers.
Note to the Chick legal team: I'll be glad to take it down if you give me my password! :)
Dark Reflection
Back in 1996-97 I made an extremely amateurish geocities site with some unfinished programming tutorials, the most popular of which was on qbasic. I sort of stopped working on it after a while, lost my password, and couldn't get yahoo to authenticate me years later when I wanted to remove my ridiculous site. The bio page is especially embarrassing, and the programming material that is there is of no use today. Honestly I'm too lazy to expend any more energy in my effort to shut down my site, so naturally I am relieved to see yahoo pulling the plug on geocities. The way I see it, the internet is cleaner without my site clogging the tubes. My site could live indefinitely in archiving systems, but hopefully someday it won't even show up on a search for "qbasic programming". Will the web naturally garbage collect my orphaned web page, without my intervention?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
n/t
>internet wayback machine
who do you think archive.org is?
And google cache is strictly short term.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Wouldn't you?
with that site gone, how will people ever know that soy beverages, soy cheese, soy flour, soy meal, soy oil, soy sauce, soy protein, and soybeans ALL CONTAIN SOY PRODUCTS?
i know it's not all of them, but seriously - damn near half of the products on that page have SOY in the name. i can only deduce that geocities hates natural selection.
the united states is a nation of laws; badly written and randomly enforced -- frank zappa