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

Well, crap

[rritterson]

And now my early-teen horrible taste and design ability will live forever in it's terrible FrontPage '97 designed glory. Hallelujah!

Download the internet

[Drakkenmensch]

Not so crazy now, is it?

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

[cyan]

To answer your question: http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/

Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

And nothing of value was... saved?

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:might be interesting to host it?

[cyan]

Already done. http://geociti.es/

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.