Roundup: Last Call for GeoCities

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Roundup: Last Call for GeoCities

Roundup: Last Call for GeoCities
- By: Rich Miller
  October 26th, 2009
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Today, Oct. 26, is the day that Yahoo has said will be the final day of availability for its GeoCities hosting service and the hundreds of thousands - perhaps even millions – of free web sites it contains. There’s been a burst of news and nostalgia around the shuttering of the site. Here’s a roundup:
- There have been a number of efforts to preserve the GeoCities sites for posterity, including one by the Internet Archive and another by Archive Team, a separate group. Both efforts began this spring.
- Another effort was begin on Oct. 20 (yep, last Tuesday) by ReoCities, which has generated interest for its mad scramble to backup all of GeoCities in less than a week. Hmmm … did they know the Archive was working on this?
- Gawker, with its usual snark, cites the evaporation of value represented by the closure, noting that Yahoo paid $3.5 billion for GeoCities in 1999.
- Netcraft notes that the impending closure will wipe out at least 930 known phishing sites, including 143 that were launched in the last month.
- News.com has invited readers to share their “favorite stories about GeoCities.”
- Slashdot links to a number of tributes around the web, including ones at xkcd and Homestar Runner.

GeoCities is Dead. Long Live ReoCities…?!

Posted October 28th, 2009

[...] Roundup: Last Call for GeoCities (datacenterknowledge.com) [...]

Jim Habegger

Posted November 25th, 2009

Some other things I’m hoping someone will do:

1. Archiving references to Geocities that might be needed for preservation and reconstruction projects, before they disappear too.

I didn’t remember my original neighborhood address. Luckily I found it in my archives. Then when I googled it, I found it in a guest book that I had signed.

There might be information here and there about the contents of Geocities pages, that could be used to reconstruct pages that weren’t preserved. One way to find that information is to Google all the possible neighborhood URLs.

2. Recapturing the spirit of Geocities.

There is more to the Geocities heritage than Web pages. Part of what Geocities means to me is the in the spirit of it, including the organization of the neighborhoods, the community leaders and the work they did, the community centers and the community activities. I would like to see those reconstructed or at least represented somehow, possibly with the help of former community leaders.

3. I would like to see a site about where the community leaders are now and what they are doing.

4. I would like to see a site about people’s memories of Geocities and what it meant to them, and/or still means to them, for its own sake and for the ideas it might inspire about what to preserve and reconstruct, and how.