A little over five years ago, I wrote an essay and put it on my weblog, talking about Wikipedia. After that essay came a number of essays, including an example entry, a bunch of predictions, a for-dummies version, and the occasional comment on current events within the Wikipedia space.  I also gave presentations about my thoughts on Wikipedia, including this one, this one, this one (for which I was flown to London) and a couple at other places, including Google. Those were very fun and I thank my hosts for the opportunities.

For all that verbiage and presentation, it would be sad if this was all I did with my time, and obviously I believe I’ve done a lot more than that. But understandably, this got me billed as a Wikipedia Critic, and in some situations The Wikipedia Critic.

I have written so much, so many places, and made so many people miserable when they asked me to recount the reasons for my position, that I’m not inclined to drop much in this notation other than to say I’ve really, really not been convinced I wasn’t right, that I stand by what I said, and I’m pretty sure the problem will not repair itself.  But let me add some additional thoughts for perspective.

The Wikipedia of today is not the same entity it was 5 years ago – everything grows and changes.  They’ve had staff churn, moved locations, and gone through several dozen rounds of what I labelled “information fads”; changes in policy and outlook on information classification mean that there have been what could sensationally call pogroms but in fact are just slow paper-pushing of other peoples’ work to show you’re “improving” wikipedia. I’ve watched the entries of living people fossilize and the Wikimedia Foundation add what is essentially a hotline to complain about bad changes to them, and I’ve watched the locking down of entries increase dramatically, like all tools of control tend to. Through all of this, the project has survived, but the missing fact in all the lauding of Wikipedia is that when you turn collections of information into living things, those living things have an actual life cycle, and at the end of the life cycle is decay, irrelevancy, and destruction.

I still harbor little respect for Jimbo Wales, and don’t see that changing anytime soon. I don’t wish to waste your time with my big bad listing of why I think he’s a toad, but I didn’t want to lead you astray that I’ve gone soft or something. Wikipedia needed him for its success, since lying is part of the game and the slicker the liar the quicker the success, but that doesn’t mean I have to think much of him beyond that.  So I won’t.

Speaking of muckity-mucks. I met Erik Möller, you know. Chatted amicably for most of it and we only raised our voices at each other a couple times. Something that I think gets lost in all of these discussions and debates and things I’ve said and written is that I don’t consider any of the human parties particularly evil, or displaying malice. Some have shown to be petty, and controlling, and Wikipedia allows you to game the system both on the back and front ends to your own purposes, but these people are not, you know, subhuman villains or something.  I watched a couple, over the years, who were easily the worst offenders of abuse and power-madness, divest and leave the Wikipedia space and become critics in their own right. I think there’s something to be said for the philosophical idea that it’s sometimes not the person, but the role that causes the pain and despair. The person should be held accountable, but they’re not the sole motivating force; it literally is a case of if they weren’t there, Wikipedia’s structure would invent them. Erik is what the system needed, and I do respect someone leaving his homeland definitively and completely to travel halfway around the world for something that he believes in. I even got a hug off him.

I’ve been thanked and high-fived and smiled at for my criticism, and I’ve been threatened, insulted and lied about as well. It comes with being high-profile with something, and it’s something I’ve had to deal with in other subjects since. What I have not been, really, is corrected or given a situation where I thought I’ve been wrong. I’ve made predictions that have gone south, but usually because the prediction has become irrelevant, much like debates about classifying all BBSes as businesses became moot when ISPs took over.  I’ve watched things I said five years ago continue to be the case, and watched people innovate new ways to be fucks. I’ve watched a lot of people take Wikipedia entries and treat them as the end-case proof of something, but I’ve watched a lot of other people snort when someone cites Wikipedia.

As I write this, Wikipedia is going through another destructive information fad – tons of computer history articles are being deleted, and people are letting me know of them. Every one that’s been deleted, I could do a really nice page on. In some cases, the number of people voting/discussing the deletion of an article are as little as 3-4. This is fine for me, as I’ll just bring the information back better, more completely, and better researched. I’ve been given a mandate to do so, after all. After I finish my movie, that’s where I’m turning. The entries on Impulse Tracker, Fidonews, SDF BBS, and many others are gone, but I’ll give those subjects their due, I promise.

Some of the names of the deleters are in my memory of the years – others are not. Like I said, roles are at play. Deleting things should be a sorry, sad act, and one done carefully and with a way to pull them back if they’re improved or repaired. A few choices many years ago ensured this wouldn’t be the case. I’ve been sent more terrible recountings of Wikipedia horrors and internal politics that I think I’ve cared to see, and none of it tells me to follow the refrain so lauded, so pushed by anyone who is under Wikipedia’s spell: If you have issues with Wikipedia, join it. No, thank you. I have a lot of unique work being taken in no other quarters, and I think concentrating on that stuff betters the world a lot more than joining the endless Sisyphean experience of a Wikipedia member.

Do I still comment or occasionally roust some indignation on what goes on there? Oh, sure. Even in a machete war, you have to admire/notice the guy who gets three machetes in his head, or the person who carves particularly elaborate symbols in his victim’s chests. Even in the horror, there is, ultimately its own level of horror. And that’s kind of where it’ll always be.

One last, positive note: Through the years of listening to interviews and presentations on the subject of Wikis, one name has really consistently impressed me: Ward Cunningham, the credited creator of the Wiki concept. This is a brilliant, brilliant man, who has done a lot of good in the world, and who has maintained the perspective, intelligence and insight that befits someone of that pedigree. I have never heard anything that puts his voice to digitized form that didn’t make me think to myself, now here is a guy who I am lucky to share the planet with. Were there more like him, a lot of problems in the world would be merely bad possibilities and not reality. I wish him a very long life.

I wish everyone, in fact, a very long life. At the end of the day, we are discussing ideas, and the ideas, for all the efforts of people, will survive.

And that’s a comforting thought.

I dream of a time when I won’t have to write things like this. When I can focus on uplifting, informative posts or essays or speeches in which I talk about neat stuff I’ve found, or connections I’ve tracked down, or some crazy hilarious thing that happened that I want to share with you.

But that day’s not here, so let’s instead talk about Metaplace.

In September of 2007,  Metaplace was announced as an alpha [1][2][3] after nine months of speculation about what it was. [4] About a year later, the system was open to a selection of users in a “closed beta”. [5] Finally, it went to a complete open beta in May of this year. [6] Estimates are that about 70,000 “virtual worlds” were built on what turned out to be a neutral, facilitative background for multiplayer experiences.  A lot of press is out there about this place, with a lot of haughty language, discussions of an “avatar bill of rights“, and the potentials for the future power of the metaplace arena. [7]

Faithful readers will of course know that the reason I’m bringing this up, this thing you might or might not have heard of, is because metaplace has announced that they’re shutting down.

In 9 days.

As of January 1st.

Let’s not think I’m exaggerating. The announcement came on December 21st, and is effective on January 1st. Less than two weeks, for people to pack up their shit, shit they worked on for months, shit that they were paying money for metaspaces to host.

Except they kind of can’t pack up their shit.

This is what I’m talking about of dreaming of a day. In that hopefully-mundane day, the closing of a website or a service would be tragic or delightful, but the data, which the users contributed and added to the place, would be something they could easily, and quickly extract out.

The question I had for Raph Koster and Tami Baribeau, the forward-facing people behind Metaplace, was this:

“Where’s your export function?”

Actually, that’s not big enough.

“WHERE THE FUCK IS YOUR EXPORT FUNCTION?”

Don’t waste my time apologizing for them. Don’t tell me I’m being too harsh. Maybe I should be giving them some big ol’ hugs here, a few days before Christmas, that they are closing up shop during the holidays and expecting people to go through the insane manual procedures they’ve blown in to get your stuff off. It’s a nightmare maze of manual URL grabbing, save-as lists, and weird commands that give you even more work. At the end of it, your data is a jumbled mess, subject to however you downloaded and classified it yourself, and prone to error because you were fucking trying to do all this during the holidays.

If your thing that takes in user content doesn’t have an export function, that is, a big button with a few selection boxes for exactly how much of your shit you want to take down, with one of the options being “all of my shit”, then they are stealing your shit from you.

Oh, sure, we have gigabytes of record of Koster bloviating about player rights and the meaning of games and what it’s all about in the process of building community around a virtual world, but here we have the real story: make no preparations for the end, assume all the stuff made with you is yours yours yours, and make it difficult for people to go elsewhere. Guess what, kids – it’s 2009. The days when it was this amazing crazy-ass thing that a server on a computer out there on the Internet could hold data for you and still be there when your browsed back… well, that was probably 13 years ago and counting. It’s not amazing anymore. It’s not something that lets you get away with acting like you just strapped together 400 milk jugs and put a wooden door down and miraculously floated down the fucking river. It’s basic shit. And along with something becoming basic shit is the idea of an open platform, of letting your company’s skills and interaction with customers define why they should keep their data, and not locking them up behind what they call a “walled garden” but which fails to make clear your users did all the gardening. Excuse time is over. It shouldn’t be the way it is now.

But it is. So Metaplace will die, as they all die, with a pathetic message blown out like it was all a big fun old time, and with a few mumbled incoherencies about being able to “manually save” some jigsaw pieces of your work, and a few articles and then a long black space where it used to be. A few people will mention it in the same breath as other failed virtual spaces, a punchline, an insider or industry reference, a few years down the line. Koster walks the Earth free. Baribeau becomes “community manager” of another unsuspecting chicken coop of suckers, unaware the flamethrower might be turned on at any moment.

I am saying, basically, that this is bullshit. It has to stop.

Raph announced this closure letting people know that even though he was shitcanning metaplace, there were still “exciting plans” afoot.  To this I say no, you shitheel, you don’t get to have “exciting plans”. You get to desperately scramble to come up with some solid reasons why metaplace imploded, and why anybody should trust you with a fucking three-byte string anytime in the next few years. You get to grovel, and explain why there was no warning, and why the best lifeboat you can muster up for the people who trusted you with their creation and data is a Do-It-Yoo-Seff(tm) notepad-and-right-click combo, repeated endlessly, throughout Christmas.

Otherwise, O wise god of gaming theory, you are a fuck.

Metaplace has set up a new website/forum called metaplaceveterans.com which acts like it’s a hang-out spot for people who used Metaplace and want to connect. In point of fact, it’s an IQ test: if someone burns down your rented apartment, and then pulls an RV up outside your smoldering wreck, exactly how much of a gullible retard are you to happily get into that RV with what you have left? At best, it functions as an instant mailing/contact list entitled “People we can do whatever the fuck we want to and they’ll take it like little giggly bitches”. At worst, it just shows the level of ignorance implied in destroying metaplace so quickly, so viciously, and then smiling at the end like our awesome kegger got broken up by the cops.

How many more times? How many more?

…Jason is Editing.

Just no way around it. The remainder of this month and most of January are going to be pretty light in terms of weblog postings. When I do “real” ones, that is, ones with a beginning, middle, and end and which present some position or information and then researched as deep as I can… well, those take time and time is what I do not have right now.

With full-time availability to edit GET LAMP, that is what I am doing. That and making the usual side arrangements for artwork, music, and all the fun aspects of DVD production. I can slip stuff in every once in a while, but somehow writing seems to take a backseat to doing. I’ll be sure to write what I’ve learned during this period, though.

It saddens me when I see the stats go down, as people’s RSS feeders find no new news from me after their periodic crawl. I enjoy having frequent postings, adding my words to other people’s lives. But right now, every hour I don’t spend editing ends up being the chance of missing a great phrase, a good extra cut, a wonderful juxtaposition. I promise I’ll be back in full force once the masters head to the duplicator, until then, we’ll definitely have spotty postings.

Don’t worry, it’ll be worth it.

I already wrote reviews of WizzyWIG Volume 1 and WizzyWIG Volume 2, Ed Piskor’s fun stew of hacking and phreaking history put out in a graphic novel format.  If you didn’t read them or don’t remember the gist of them, it was archivist/historian guy really liked these things, and that opinion hasn’t changed on subsequent reads. I think they’re fun, they capture the feelings on all sides about the modern idea of the hacker/phreak, and they’re just really well done.

Ed has finished Volume 3 of WizzyWIG, this tale of Kevin Phenicle, a legend of hackerdom on the run from the law and the reverberations he brings to society and perception of the technically astute. It’s on sale for pre-order right now, with a release set for January. I ordered three, as usual.

However, Ed has done something which, if you were sitting around saying you weren’t sure about these things, will shut you the hell up. He’s providing volumes 1 and 2 for free on PDF. Personally, I think this is nuts and think you should buy the paper books, but if you were honestly, seriously on the fence and wanted proof, go ahead and grab the .zip from his page and start reading up. If you are of the temperament that likes reading me, you’re going to enjoy these, simple as that.

I brought Ed Piskor to Blockparty last year, where he spoke about his process of making WizzyWIG.  Also in attendance was Emmanuel Goldstein, who was part of the composite character of one of the figures in the book. I was quite happy to have them in the same place:

So what is the problem here? Are you not already downloading that .zip file and ordering your copy? What’s holding you back?

Pete Chiola died on November 9th. If you were lucky, you knew him. If you weren’t lucky, let me make you a little more lucky.

Depending on the nature of a divorce and the circumstances afterwards, and the age of any children and a whole bunch of factors, the addition of new strangers into your family can be taken any number of ways.  In my case, I took the policy that if a guy put up with some woman’s kids, spent a lot of time with her, and did so for years on end, then stepfather he was. And in that realm, Pete was a stepfather to me.

For over a decade he was a part of my life, from my barely-double-digit years through to when I went off to college. This was post the shock of divorce and in that wasteland that filled my days with discomfit and awkwardness.  Years before I’d found solace and joy in computers and still do. With a father in the technical field and a mother in the artistic one, I was a strange blend of poetry and programming.  Running around and sports was not my preference, and I was more likely to shut myself up in a self-constructed kingdom of recovered TVs and Atari hardware in the rooms I shared with my brother.

While I don’t recall being particularly awful to Pete when he started showing up, I’m probably just kidding myself. I’m a bristly person, and I am sure that lacking any real say or choice in 1981, I was just as strange and withdrawn as anything else.

Date the mom, know the kids. Anything else leads to a lot of big trouble and a lot of unpleasantness. Pete did his best with the three rambunctious children that were part of the package, and which were an additional three on top of the kids he’d had with his own failed marriage.

What I remember most about Pete was his voice and his swagger. He was older than my dad, and his skills were in building and working with his hands. I’d been told by my mom that he’d lost some of his hearing over the years, and that explained his volume. His volume was loud.  “Jeezus Christ, kid!” was the prefix to a whole host of inquisitive questions, like why I was inside all the time or what I was up to or even passing the time. Imagine puckering your lips a little and raising your head up and to the right, and then snapping it back – this was Pete’s reaction when I dropped some sort of silly whopper of a tale or made some crazy statement.

I remember a couple points in there where there was some attempt to integrate the shuffling little Jason into the rhythms of life as Pete knew them. They were all failures, but I have not forgotten them.

I recall an attempt to bring me on a worksite, to help with some basic aspects of lifting things and holding stuff up. I was not built that way, didn’t have the upper body strength and definitely didn’t have the stamina. All I had was my ability to talk constantly, and contrive more and more exquisite excuses as to why I couldn’t be doing actual physical work. Pete was not impressed.  I was, however, wowed by his stamina, our getting up early in the morning, grabbing coffee, and heading down to the site in Pete’s pickup truck. That truck was a part of my life for a good long time.

Pete was country. Loved country music, and passed that to me – it might seem strange, for those who know of me and the stuff I do, but I love country as much as I do a lot of other music. Pete had favorite songs, songs by George Strait and Willie Nelson and I got to hear all of them, joyfully sung to himself or out loud while working on various stuff. At one point, my Mom and Pete made money on the side as country line dancing teachers. I remember a couple lessons teaching me the basic steps. I never got into it, but I did buy some boots for myself, and I had a pretty swell cowboy hat for a time. Yes, I am not making any of this up.

I didn’t know him as “Pistol Pete” – he was just “Pete” to me, but a hell of a lot of people knew him, hung with him, spent time out on his boat or working with him, and they were better for it.

We butted heads, sure. He’d already raised kids, and wasn’t into raising a whole other set again. I was a bizarre enigma of a kid, and my love of microcomputers was weird and strange. Again, I don’t recall any all-out fights, but I do recall raised voices. Still, I got some really sweet computer gifts from my mom under his watch, so there was some approval there, or at least a tacit sign-off to what the eldest was into.

After a while, he and my mom split up, and I didn’t see Pete much at all again. I was in college, like I said, and so I had my own trails to ride on.

I’d thought about Pete every once in a while, occasionally blasted “Okie from Muskogee” by Merle Haggard, and lived my life. His print was indelible and a part of what I am. I’m sorry we didn’t spend more time together. I’m glad for what we got.

Here’s the obituary:

Peter L. Chiola lifetime resident of Bedford Hills, NY died on November 9, 2009 He was 79 years old. Mr. Chiola worked as a machinist for Kensico Tube in Mt. Kisco. Mr. Chiola was born June 29, 1930 in Mt. Kisco, to Peter and Carmella Placona Chiola. He was educated in Bedford Hills, NY where he graduated from high school. He earned an associates degree from Westchester Community College in Valhalla, NY. Mr. Chiola served in the Air National Guard stationed in Newfoundland. Mr. Chiola will be remembered for his devotion to his family and friends, his love of country music and dancing. He was one of the first dance instructors in the tri-state area and was known to his dancing friends as “Pistol Pete”. He also had a love for boating, fishing and blackjack. He is survived by his beloved daughter Laurie of Bedford Hills. Devoted son Peter J. (Barbara) of Bedford Hills, Cherished grandchildren Taylor and Justin. Caring former wife Terry Chiola of Bedford Hills, and loving long-time companion Cathy Mastracchio of Peekskill, NY caring sister Grace Teixeira of Mt. Kisco, and many loving nieces and nephews.

Yes, it’s time. Thanks to the generosity of 350 people, I’ve been able to work on things that matter to me and really stretch out my days with all my projects. So I can announce:

GET LAMP, my documentary on text adventures, is going to be released in March of 2010.

Right now I’m focusing on editing, features, and packaging for a 2-DVD set. I expect there will be a digital release and other formats as well, but I have no details on that.

There are many, many more details to come. The main reason I’m mentioning this at all right now is I am extending a special offer to “the fans”, as it were.

The documentary 2-DVD set will be $40. This I already know.

If you pre-order it now, however, it will cost you $30, a 25% discount.

The page for pre-ordering does not have much information on the packaging, what’s in it, what the whole thing is about. This is intentional; partially because some information is in flux, and partially because this offer is for the people who have been supporting me and helping me over the past few years. For these folks, they intend to buy it basically sight unseen; they just want the word. Well, here’s the word. And that’s why the discount is there.

I’m closing up the discounted price at the end of December. After that, it goes to $40 as I put up screenshots, packaging shots as they become available, and other information.

So if you were waiting for your chance, my wonderful friends, this is the time to pre-order.

Thank you.

I have had a talk accepted for Shmoocon 2010, held in Washington DC on February 5-7. The topic, I’m happy to say, will be Archive Team, that little project I got wrapped into earlier this year. This was a talk I had proposed for CCC 26, but their absolutely terrible paper submission site gave me some big trouble and ultimately I had filed it in the wrong place, and the wrong way. So sorry, no visit to Berlin, but one down the train line to a con I’ve been to a few times before.

Shmoocon becomes famous around November of each year as being The Con That Almost Nobody Can Get Into. There’s three rounds of tickets, and to give you an idea of how crazy it is, round number two sold out completely in eight fucking minutes. They’ve got the best and the worst sort of problem – everyone wants to attend, but the organizers don’t want it to turn into a bombastic crowd-heavy morass.  So they invent A Number, and that Number turns out to be way south of what the potential audience is. I don’t even try, to be honest – I just apply to be a speaker and if I get in, I get in.

One year I spoke about shooting in the real Colossal Cave in Kentucky. Another time I spoke about the One Laptop Per Child Project, and became (I believe) the highest paid speaker that year because I got a speaking fee but only spoke for about 7 minutes (while helping behind the scenes with the other presentations). I’ve always had a fun time there. It’s run by very good people, and order is maintained by same. There’s a tension between Security and Hacking presentations, like at DEFCON or elsewhere, but I think they do a very good job with the mix.

Here’s my presentation description for this year:

The Splendiferous Story of Archive Team and the Rapidly Disappearing Digital Heritage

The Splendiferous Story of Archive Team and the Rapidly Disappearing Digital Heritage is a fast-paced, context-heavy, hilarious yet intense overview of ways in which digital history has been lost, how it might be saved, and what it all means. It is a manifesto and a narrative about work being done on many quarters by a ragtag bunch of volunteers to gather and contain various lost sites, as well as a fist-waving rant about the downward spiral of over-reliance on the idea of the Cloud and the forfeiting of digital identity to parties truly unknown. Archive Team mascot Jason Scott will cover what’s being done, how it’s being done, and what you can do to help.

Like I said, it’s a pretty hard conference to get into (one round is left in January) and so I promise you there’ll be video footage, just like the other speeches recently. I think this is critical stuff to get the word out about, so I thank Shmoocon for the chance to tell the story of Archive Team and raise some ruckus.

The BBS List project, which has a long and storied history for me and helped inspire what eventually came the BBS Documentary, has grown quite well over the years.  From its initial slashdotting, it’s become incredibly popular, with additional listings added by the day. (Over 105,000 BBSes and counting).

Something had always driven me nuts, a side-effect of the timeframe of when I started the project.  Next to each entry is the town the BBS was in. Problem is, the methodology for calculating this was always out of date, because of area code splits. Once an area code might be an entire state – but then it would become a city in the entire state. Minor, to some eyes. But I have literally received over a thousand e-mails saying “That wasn’t the town my BBS was in. You screwed up.”

I knew the only way to fix this would be to have a list of all the exchanges pre-areacode-split. Not exactly something you just stumble over.

Well, unless you’re Phil Lapsley, author of the soon-to-be-amazing book on the history of phone phreaking. Then you stumble all sorts of amazing stuff.

For example, a 1974 Distance Dialing Guide.

This was a book with lots of information on the Bell system of 1974, before pretty much all area codes split. (They actually split Illinois a year after area codes were first started in 1947 – oh, and if you’re into area codes, you have to check out LincMad’s area code site.)

In fact, this book will be an excellent litmus test – are you a phone phreak, or a closeted one? Just check out this guide, read it over, and if you enjoy it… well, now you know. Welcome to the club.

It’ll take me a little time to actually integrate this information. But happily, this document does it – it solves a major problem, the last big one with the BBS List.

I can’t wait to not get the town e-mails ever again.

Yes, that’s right, it’s official:

After hitting the one million file mark in December of 2005 and passing the two million mark a few years later, we’re now at over 3,000,000 files on cd.textfiles.com, my shareware and shovelware collection. I’ve ranted about this thing consistently for years – it’s one of my favorite projects. For the most recent injection, I had a collection of 20 CD-ROMs I bought off of e-bay ($10 plus shipping) and of those, 14 were not previously on the site. I also had a couple .RAR collections people had sent me, and between it all, I suddenly found myself adding another 10 gigabytes of material.

A while ago I added an undocumented feature. (It’s still waiting to be prettied up.) If you go to this page you can get a list, newest to oldest, of all the CD directories on the site.

As you can also see, it’s 293 gigabytes of delight, making it by far the largest of the TEXTFILES.COM properties.

So many times I use this thing, almost daily. It’s my own personal online library of BBS and computer history. It solves disputes, it finds old textfiles, it truly is a swiss army knife of history. And judging by the marauding bands of downloaders, it’s also a pretty popular site for others. I think a torrent is in order… don’t you?

One of the projects on the burner is to once and for all ISO all the Shareware CDs in my collection and put them online, scanned booklets and all. We’ll see how that goes. Until then, enjoy the avalanche!

I was asked by someone working for a Very Big Newspaper to write something to appear in the Very Big Newspaper.  Told I needed it in within a couple days and definitely by morning of a Thursday, I pulled an all-nighter and composed the writing as well as ensuring Geociti.es had a copy. It is now 30 days later and guess what happened. I am therefore publishing it here. Bear in mind that it was written to be the very first time the reader might have considered or really heard of Geocities; jaded ASCII blog readers are likely to sniff. Feel free to reprint this, as long as you are not the Very Big Newspaper, who I am sure will have a Very Literate and Well-Meaning Reason For Never Writing Back One Way Or Another but seriously can cram themselves into a boiler.

To browse among these artifacts is to find a cross-section of humanity. A mother’s emotional memories of the loss of her two year old son, sixteen years earlier. A self-described alien abductee’s recounting of 25 years of unusual memories and ufo sightings. A proud owner of a parrot. All of them dated, or strange, or heartwarming. And all of them gone.

When Yahoo! Inc. shuttered the free web hosting site Geocities this past week, the explanation given by the company was a classic example of uplifting corporate euphemism: ”We have enjoyed hosting web sites created by Yahoo! users all over the world, and we’re proud of the community you’ve built,” an information page explained. “However, we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways.”

But behind this statement was the wholesale destruction of hundreds of thousands of websites, many of them over a decade old and representing some of the first general user sites to come online. Not created by experimenting technical wizards or forward-thinking companies, these sites were hand-made by regular folks – people who had heard there was a thing called the Internet and they should consider buying a modem and getting on the bandwagon.

At a time when full-color printing for the average person was a dollar-per-printed-page proposition and a pager was the dominant (and expensive) way to be reached anywhere, mid 1990s web pages offered both a worldwide audience and a near-unlimited palette of possibility. It is not unreasonable to say that a person putting up a web page might have a farther reach and greater potential audience than anyone in the history of their genetic line.

But putting a website online was often a difficult experience, requiring access to a server with a IP address, a knowledge of operating systems and programming, and in some cases paying significant money and fighting uphill for negotiating domain registration and hardware purchases.

This changed as companies such as Geocities, Tripod and Angelfire joined what became the dot-com boom and started offering these services for low cost, and eventually for free. From a widening field of competitors, Geocities rose up to be the dominant player, with hundreds of thousands of accounts and an enviable webrank – in 1999 it was estimated to be the third most browsed website anywhere on the internet. This success, built on a volunteer force of hundreds and an ever-growing userbase, had allowed Geocities to go public, and ultimately be bought by Yahoo for a still-staggering 3 billion dollars.

In recent years, the site had fallen out of favor but still had some pull – Alexa rated it as the 196th most popular site the week before it went down. And it still stood as an example of the general public joining the Internet, with loud backgrounds, spinning logos, and guestbooks dominating through a cycle of fads and explorations of what a website should be.

Here’s a collection of curated websites from the now-departed Geocities, a large of which was downloaded by a group of rogue archivists I’m proud to be a part of: the Archive Team.

http://geociti.es/Heartland/Hills/1961/
Dee’s Parrot Page
Last updated July 30, 1998

Untouched since three months before Google incorporated as a  privately-held company, “Dee’s Parrot Page” contains a clear indication of a pre-Yahoo Geocities site: the owner is a “Community Leader” in her online Neighborhood, assisting others in putting up their pages on a volunteer basis. Yahoo did away with volunteer leaders soon after their purchase of Geocities, removing an entire support network from the site with no direct replacement. Like other pages in this period, Dee’s page loses its layout in screen resolutions greater than 800×600. The menu for the site, created using a long-outdated Java applet, confounded crawlers; the remainder of this site is lost to history.

http://www.geociti.es/Area51/Cavern/3220/
AF-7′s Home Page
Last updated January 24, 2001

The “Area51″ neighborhood of Geocities was dedicated to science fiction, paranormal, and fantasy subjects, including UFOlogy. The front page is a blend of animated graphics and badges of membership in a variety of UFO and Paranormal activities.This site, run by AF-7 (short for “Alien Friend 7″) contains a personal journal of nearly a quarter-century of unexplained events in the author’s life. One sub-page entitled “Personal Experience: Sightings” lists dozens of UFO and strange visions; another lists “Paranormal” experience, such as visions of a past life or visions of future events. An example of a Paranormal experience: “12 March 1988 – Dale City, Virginia. Precognition? We were watching the David Copperfield X: The Bermuda Triangle special on TV. hen he disappeared into the pyramid, I knew he would return with the tugboat that had been missing before they showed it on TV. My senses were heightened throughout the show.”

http://geociti.es/Heartland/Fields/9422/patrick.html
Patrick Joel
Last Updated July 29, 2004

A memorial site to a child who entered a hospital with an ear infection at two years of age and died during surgery; maintained by his mother, who created the site sixteen years later, in 1999. Besides a first-person account of a parent losing her child, the author provides memories of her son, a scrapbook of photographs, and poems and biblical passages. Her pain is evident in every paragraph, every page. The site is decorated with images of angels - in fact, it is part of a ”webring” (group) of “Moms of Angels”, for mothers who have lost their children. A bright side emerges from the tragedy; a young girl at the same hospital recieves some of Patrick’s organs and survives; the site urges parents to consider organ donation to lessen the sense of loss, as it did for them.

http://geociti.es/Nashville/1756/nfindex.html
Allen & Becki’s Page
Last Updated July 16, 2000

Originally, web pages had an unchangeable background- a grey color was the norm, on top of which was black text. Over time, browsers and HTML were modified to allow more exotic designs, including this example, which came from the Nashville neighborhood of Geocities. (Geocities originally separated into geographic “neighborhoods” that represented different interests; ”Nashville” was for “Country” or “Country Music”.) The use of a bucking horse graphic as the background, combined with the light blue text, ensures that this welcoming page from a military man and his wife is very difficult to read; usability experts might cringe at these choices but the users thought this was a perfectly fine aesthetic. Interestingly enough, the author is a member of the ”HTML Writers’ Guild”, an ad-hoc (and later for-pay) guild of web designers.

http://geociti.es/WestHollywood/Heights/2563/
The Shack
Last Updated November 21, 2006

Redesigned from the ground up in 2006, the author reminisced about his first experience with Geocities: ”The moment I discovered the Web, I fell in love. A new and exciting world opened up and I simply couldn’t get enough of it. The Shack was first constructed way back in July ’97 by a 53 year old, crazy redhead, who had just discovered the “Web”, Paint Shop Pro 5, and the Geocities Neighborhood where you could put up a free web page…Life in cyberspace was much different then. There were no shopping sites to speak of, or financial sites, no Amazon, or Barnes and Noble, and basically life was simple! You didn’t have to be afraid of having your identity stolen or opening an email to find it had a virus in it..People were connecting in a totally different way, sites sprung up everywhere, and we all marveled at just how cool this New World was! This little corner of cyberspace has provided me with lots of opportunities to meet some great neighbors, learn a lot of really neat new things, broaden my horizons, and expand my creativity. YES I am addicted to this web and am so thankful for my cyberworld.”