Bruce Lawson’s personal site

Goodbye, GeoCities: It’s the end of an era

Long-term readers may recall my 2004 CSS Zen Garden design, GeoCities 1996.

Now Yahoo! has pulled the plug on the GeoCities domain and all the sites hosted there, I’ve written a short article for ZDNet

GeoCities once seemed to occupy an unassailable position on the web, so its recent demise contains important lessons about the nature of the medium, says Bruce Lawson.

Read it.

8 Responses to “ Goodbye, GeoCities: It’s the end of an era ”

Comment by David W

Don’t miss http://reocities.com/ , some guy set a cluster to the task of leeching as much as possible before the plug was pulled. Last I read, he was working with The Internet Archive to merge what they had with his crawl.

In my opinion, it’s probably one of the most important efforts that might be made in the future history of the Internet, to preserve its heritage. :)

David

Comment by Chris Hunt

Two guys crawling through the desert (who knows, maybe it’s the same two?) desperate for a drink of water. Crossing a sand dune they come a cross a row of market stalls.

They ask the first stallholder for water, but he says “sorry effendi, I only have sponge fingers on this stall”.

The second is no better – all he has to sell is jelly and custard. The last stall holder is even worse, all he offers is a sprinkling of hundreds and thousands.

The two thirsty men crawl on. One comments “that was pretty weird, wasn’t it?”. “Yes,” says the other, “it was a trifle bizarre”.

I’ll get my coat.

This comment was originally posted on Bruce Lawson’s personal site

Comment by Bill Lees

Right. Bloke tries to get into a night-club, only to be told by the bouncer that he isn’t allowed in without a tie. Crestfallen, he heads back to his parked car to see whether he has anything in there that he can use as a tie. Unfortunately, the best he can do is the set of jumper cables that he keeps in the car, which he nevertheless improvises into a sort of neckwear by tying around his throat, and marches back to the night club entrance. The bouncer stops him, saying “Oi – didn’t I tell you you needed a tie?” to which the bloke responds by indicating his jump-lead neckwear. “All right then” says the bouncer, “I’ll let you in. Just don’t start anything”.

This comment was originally posted on Bruce Lawson’s personal site

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