Geocities To Be Made Available As a 900GB Torrent

An anonymous reader writes "Felt a shortage of the blink tag in your life lately? Well, have no fear. One year after Geocities was shut down in a cost-cutting move by Yahoo, a group self-styled as 'The Archive Team' have announced they will be releasing a ~900GB torrent file archive. It doesn't have every single site, but they believe they got most of it. The team believes that it's important to not just delete our digital culture, and as crazy as Geocities may have been, it was an important cultural milestone in the history of showing that anyone could create content online."

Comments

I see TFA thinks to ask the same question I did

[idontgno]

Of course, someone could make the argument that this archive is copyright infringement. I doubt anyone will, but it is an interesting question. The archiving is an important point in preserving digital history, and yet it's also a moment of massive copyright infringement -- technically speaking. This is the sort of bizarrely bad result you get in a world where copyright is automatically given to any content at the moment of creation. Most of the people creating Geocities pages would have no reason (or desire) to copyright what they created, and yet they all got it by default.

In this insanely litigious society, I wonder what kind of copyright release (from all the grillions of Geocities content copyright holders) these "Archive" chaps got? I hope it doesn't come back to bite them.

On an unrelated note, anyone wanna bet how many megabytes of this 1TB torrent is <blink> tags and "under construction" GIFs?

Re:I see TFA thinks to ask the same question I did

[Monkeedude1212]

I don't think you can be sued for copying a web page to a file... If so, browsers better take out that page view source functionality because it makes it all too easy.

If you were to perhaps actually host a website, with some of the infringing material, then I think you might have grounds. But an archive of it all? I doubt it.

And to think.

[LWATCDR]

It all can be stored on a drive that costs less then $100.
Now is that 900GB compressed or not? not compressed it would be a few hundred dollars for a RAID.

Geocities was important

[geekoid]

It basically told everyone how the internet as the web as a whole would be laid out, from a users perspective, not a technology perspective.
.

Re:Geocities was important

[SuricouRaven]

It also told the world that when everyone has a right to speak, not everyone deserves to be listened to.

Re:might be interesting to host it?

[Superken7]

why not host it on the same distributed system you will get the content from? P2P.

I am sure there has already been developed something like this (and if not, there is probably a reason on why its a bad idea), and I suspect there are many drawbacks like high latency, low bandwidth/throughput meaning very slow page loads etc...

I'm too lazy to look it up now, but just putting this thought out:

But why not just make some websites run on the same distributed DHTs such as Vuze or other existing P2P technologies?
We'd all be sharing part of the content and everyone would be able to access the content too (eventually), resulting in (slow) low-cost, ideally SPOF-free web hosting.

Re:Next-generation .torrent needed?

[ClioCJS]

What you are asking for is a next-generation torrrent client, not a next-generation torrent.

On the contrary, the web must forget

[SecurityGuy]

There's been a growing counter sentiment that I think is correct. Not only is it wrong that we must preserve everything, we should probably forget most things.

Keeping a permanent copy of every bad web site made by every bored teen is not actually useful, any more than keeping every grocery list, or to do list, or every piece of homework you ever did as a child. Some things simply don't have future value. The fact that we can keep things forever at near zero cost doesn't mean that we should keep things of near zero value. Let it go.

Human societies have this nice ability to forget. If you say something really horrible to me today, I'll be mad about it for a while, then get over it. Archiving everything means keeping this sort of thing around forever. Should we really? What's the benefit? It's not accountability. I've said stupid things online, at this point almost 20 years ago, that I now recognize to be stupid things. They aren't sentiments held by me today. Reading them today will cause you to think and feel things about me, when they were written by a quite different person. This is going to be all too common in the future when people are online in their childhood, when saying stupid things that will later embarass you is quite common, if not a daily occurrence.

In short, sure, we should remember our digital culture, but we should also throw out our digital garbage.

Re:On the contrary, the web must forget

[Darkness404]

...Except for the fact that A) It can be helpful and B) It will increasingly be easier.

I think everyone can think of a webpage (might not be Geocites) that has valuable information that has since closed. Plus, Geocites was a publishing service, these weren't like grocery lists but rather like little novels. Yeah, the content might be crap but it contains valuable information which shouldn't simply be deleted.

Plus, its becoming increasingly easier to store information. 10 years ago everyone would have laughed at you if you wanted to store this much information. Today, 1 TB drives are common and cheap.

Saving Geocites preserves "web 1.0" the time when anyone could make a webpage for the first time. While it might seem like trash to us, it might later provide valuable insight into cultures of the late 20th and early 21st century.

Re:On the contrary, the web must forget

[grumbel]

There's been a growing counter sentiment that I think is correct. Not only is it wrong that we must preserve everything, we should probably forget most things.

The problem with this case and the Internet in general, isn't so much that it forgets things, but how it forgets them. Instead of the unused content disappearing, content disappears whenever its host disappears. To put that in classical terms: whenever the author of a book loses interest, it gets deleted from all the libraries in the world, doesn't sound right, but that is pretty much how the current Internet works. In this case its even more sinister, as Yahoo pulled the plug, not the original author.

Re:On the contrary, the web must forget

[0123456]

This is the same logic that a packrat friend of mine uses when she doesn't want to throw away ANYTHING. "It is useful and valuable." Yeah? Really? If it's so useful and valuable, why the heck is it sitting in your closet/attic/basement/etc?

I'm sure some ancient Roman packrat had her friends bitching about the empty bottles and amphoras they kept in their basement, yet today archaeologists are thanking her for thereby allowing them to determine much about the diet and patterns of trade in that part of the world in that time.

Obviously the odds of some random piece of junk in your basement being useful to archaeologists in 2000 years are slim, but stashing away old digitial data is far closer to the ancient Roman packrat example.

Re:On the contrary, the web must forget

[martin-boundary]

So you're saying this is closer to the older model of "oral history", in cultures which don't write things down. The elders know the history, but when they die that history goes with them.

The lesson we learn from those older cultures is that progress accelerates when people start writing down their own history. That suggests that we should support the work of these archivers.

Re:On the contrary, the web must forget

[Joe Tie.]

Exactly. Historically, things like this geocities backup are very important. We don't usually get such elaborate records from the average citizens. We'll know about the big events of the past and what it meant to the kings and presidents of the world. But typically not so much about what the average guy just wanting to look out for his family thought of it. Even more, it's reactions to things that we might not even recognize as having any importance yet. And which, as a result, we wouldn't bother to save. But which the people of five hundred years in the future recognized as being a critical point of history.

Re:On the contrary, the web must forget

[petrus4]

Something I'm getting very tired of seeing, is chronically unintelligent, narrow minded people, using pseudo-rational arguments to promote their own bigotry.

Want to know what the one consistent element of such arguments always is? That less should exist. Fewer Linux distributions, fewer political parties, fewer languages, fewer national cultures, fewer different kinds of food.

"Make everything as uniform and as close to entirely monocultural as possible, so that I never feel forced to try to utilise the 45 measly IQ points that I have; and above all, keep freedom in any form as far away from me as possible. More than any other single thing in existence, I'm terrified of that, because I don't want to have to take any responsibility at all, for what I choose, or what I do, or how I think, or who I am."

Here's a clue. It is not going to hurt you in the slightest, if someone else wants to download the Geocities archive. If you do not want it yourself, do not download it. It's very simple. You don't want the Geocities archive yourself; that's fine. I however might want it, and I don't see why my ability to choose whether or not I get it, should be compromised by the fact that you don't want it yourself.

Stop trying to enforce your own rules with regards to other people's behaviour. Make your own choices, and let me make mine.

Re:Next-generation .torrent needed?

[Yvan256]

Shouldn't the files be in folders, meaning you can already at least target a single website?

Certainly Brings Back Memories

[Jason Levine]

When I set up my first website (not counting a little "Hey, it's me" page I did while in college), I hosted it on GeoCities. Eventually, I outgrew them and moved to a paid hosting provider. Still, for all of the flack they get for bad design, GeoCities was to the Internet what free blog hosting sites are now: a place to put your stories, photos, etc without paying anything. If Information Wants To Be Free, then Geocities was an important part of making this happen.

Sometimes, ugly things are worth keeping around

[Burning1]

Keeping a permanent copy of every bad web site made by every bored teen is not actually useful, any more than keeping every grocery list, or to do list, or every piece of homework you ever did as a child. Some things simply don't have future value. The fact that we can keep things forever at near zero cost doesn't mean that we should keep things of near zero value. Let it go.

They may not have a huge amount of value to future historians, but I bet this data does have value to the people who originally generated much of that content.

To plot a line, you need to points of reference. For us, the present provides one point of reference, and the past another. It's much easier to see where we are going as people when we can see how far we've come. Yeah, many of those old pages are embarrassing, but much like reading my own journal entries, it really helps me appreciate how I've developed as a person.

Keeping those old web pages around also shows us about the history of social network. These days, if someone wants to throw some personal information on the web, they'll open up a facebook account. With a minimal investment of time, they'll have a fairly professional place to put their thoughts, photos, comments to friends. Back in the late 90s, little or none of that existed; geocities was the closest equivalent. Without a framework, people with no talent for web design were left to code up ugly websites with copious under construction signs. I'm sure more than a few of them went on to be professionals.

We've come a long way, baby.

Re:Next-generation .torrent needed?

[British]

I'm sure this torrent would be much larger if geocities page authors didn't have so many broken image links included.

I'm sure the file would be much SMALLER if they could consolidate all the animated GIFs of the stick figure guy digging into the ground. In fact, with all the stupid animated GIFs, and about 5 sparkly backgrounds, easily compressible instances of text like "I LIKE CHRIS FARLEY", This could be a 20 meg file.