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."

Comments

Don't forget

[ipb]

to surround it all by a blink tag

Re:Don't forget

[SnowZero]

Until I found about:config, browser.blink_allowed.

How long until someone's saving Youtube videos?

[Glass Goldfish]

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.

Re:How long until someone's saving Youtube videos?

[SharpFang]

You're missing one important point:

How much would Google be losing to competition if they didn't have Youtube?

It's a war out there, and Youtube is an outpost - costly to keep, but if you don't keep it, the enemy will gain not only it but a lot of field.

I lost my geocities page password 10 years ago...

[bughunter]

I lost the password to my Geocities page 10 years ago. Think you might be able to find it?

And nothing of value was archived

[Jabbrwokk]

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.

Re:And nothing of value was archived

[jlarocco]

There was a time, I'd put it somewhere between 1996 and 1998, when Geocities wasn't half bad. Few people were really "up" on the technology, so they'd use Geocities to host real, actual pages that didn't suck. Granted it didn't last very long, and practically overnight everybody was using real hosting options for anything serious. But for a little while, seeing search engine return a link to Geocities wasn't automatically a bad thing.

Then again, maybe there just wasn't much to compare to back then. Or maybe it just seemed neat because I was only 14.

Re:And nothing of value was archived

[Eudial]

Uh. We already have repeated it. Myspace is basically last couple of years' geocities.

Now there's the web 2.0 boom which is the geocities of the future. Except, instead of small personals sites with blinking gif animations, you have big sites with horrible AJAX interfaces that completely breaks page navigation. Yes, this applies to big websites like slashdot and freshmeat as well.

What the hell? What was wrong with the old slashcode? The difference for the end user is that now you have to click 10 times to do what you could do in one click in the web 1.0 version.

The lesson to be learn is that you shouldn't fix what isn't broken.

Now I'll get back to my rocking chair. I've got kids to keep off the lawn.

Re:And nothing of value was archived

[QuantumG]

Or maybe it just seemed neat because I was only 14.

Thanks for making me feel like an old man.

Re:And nothing of value was archived

[PopeRatzo]

you shouldn't fix what isn't broken.

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.

Re:And nothing of value was archived

[Eudial]

you shouldn't fix what isn't broken.

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:

• The back, reload and forward buttons
• Navigation with the cursor keys.
• Bookmarking
• Searching in pages

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.

Re:And nothing of value was archived

[stephanruby]

Uh. We already have repeated it. Myspace is basically last couple of years' geocities.

Except for the fact that the girls are younger and sluttier, a definitive improvement.

At that rate...

[symbolset]

They'll be broke in only 40 years.

Re:At that rate...

[dswensen]

"You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars *next* year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in sixty years."

Re:At that rate...

[PopeRatzo]

They'll be broke in only 40 years.

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.

Re:At that rate...

[symbolset]

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".

We should not let this happen.

[brasselv]

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?

Re:We should not let this happen.

[brasselv]

... but you don't want to burn the only existing master of such porn films.

(Seriously, believe it or not, early porn movies of the 20's are a prized source of historical documentation. And with good reason: they tell a lot about their time.)

Re:We should not let this happen.

[PopeRatzo]

And archived porn from the 2000s will tell future generations that the sexual act in our time always ended with the man ejaculating up the woman's nose.

They'll wonder how anybody ever got pregnant around the turn of the millennium.

Re:I lost my geocities page password 10 years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you try hunter2?

Shame on Yahoo

[Xero]

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?

Who do I bribe?

[egcagrac0]

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?

Re:A lesson for future generations

[Anonymous Coward]

Along with people who insist on using fixed width fonts in a forum where *everybody* else uses proportional width fonts.

Did anyone else pronounce 'geocities'...

[Jubilex]

...to rhyme with 'atrocities' ?

Re:I lost my geocities page password 10 years ago.

[MarkRose]

What was that password? When you typed hunter2, all I saw was *******.

Re:I lost my geocities page password 10 years ago.

[powerslave12r]

"you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2" http://www.bash.org/?244321