The Rim Of Hell

LA Times – Follow the link for a great article on the imminent demise of Geocities & the little group dedicated to archiving as much of it as they can. Interesting read.

For those who don’t already know,  Geocities was the prototype to Godaddy and even Facebook.  It was designed to allow everyman to build a simple website where they could yap about whatever they wanted to the internet at large.  Sounds VERY familiar, eh?   Like many who now blog, I started with a terrible site comprised of mostly stolen code & borrowed images on Geocities. Then I moved up to Angelfire, to a slightly better site that I eventually shut down when I created The Rim of Hell. You can visit it’s tombstone HERE, although the only image on the page is corrupted now and I no longer have the login or password info to fix it.

But back to the LA Times article. The most interesting take-away to me is the Digital Archivers, who are attempting to preserve the entire network (although no one is really sure how big it is anymore!). This will undoubtedly be something more & more common in the future, as other digital offerings become outdated or obsolete. Think of the retro-gamers who collect old game console roms, or the mp3 archivists.

So that’s my new official excuse for all the time I waste out here. “I’m not downloading porn honey. I’m Digitally Archiving it!”. Think she’ll buy that? Meh, prolly not.