The Minority Report

Yahoo decided to close Geocities and I have mixed feelings about the closure. I snipped the archival effort going on and encourage my readers…hahahahahaha…to help out any way they can (as always, I have no idea why Jenna here came up on a image search for Geocities but I’m going with it…).

Like Jason Scott says, for many of us, this was our first homepage or attempt at HTML on the web. I personally don’t think that it should be lost forever. Oh and once you get through the clips, visit the site and read his shit. He’s got a great style of writing! I wish I was him.

So Yahoo, cowards that they are, announced in the most quiet and subtle manner possible that they were shutting down Geocities, the nearly 20-years-old hosting service and site that has been home to untold millions over the years.

I suppose I should be flattered that well over two dozen people have contacted me to ask, essentially, “Will Archive Team be trying to save and archive Geocities?”

And the answer, which I hope you would expect, is OF COURSE WE ARE. I’ve got experiments running as we speak, treating Geocities like a drunk cheerleader dropped into the excercise yard of a prison. It’s quite ugly: Geocities has this really insane thing where they only allow 15 megabytes of a website to be downloaded during a given hour, from anywhere, before that site goes “down” until the hour is up. This is playing hell with my scripts. They’ve also generally obliterated directories of users, but I have ways around that as well. In other words, the process has begun.

It’s cute and pithy to say “Well, good fucking riddance to Geocities”. And I totally understand that outlook, make no mistake. Many pages are amateurish. A lot have broken links, even internally. The content is tiny on a given page. And there are many sites which have been dead for over a decade. But please recall, if you will, that for hundreds of thousands of people, this was their first website. This was where you went to get the chance to publish your ideas to the largest audience you might ever have dreamed of having. Your pet subject or conspiracy theory or collection of writings left the safe confines of your Windows 3.1 box and became something you could walk up to any internet-connected user, hand them the URL, and know they would be able to see your stuff. In full color. Right now. In a world where we get pissed because the little GIF throbber stays for 4 seconds instead of the usual 1, this is all quaint. But it’s history. It’s culture. It’s something I want to save for future generations.

Already, little gems have shown up in the roughly 8000+ sites I’ve archived. Guitar tab archives. MP3s that surely took the owners hours to rip and generate. GIF files, untouched for 13 years. Fan fiction. Photographs and websites of people long dead. All stuff that, I think, down the line, will have meaning. It’s not for me to judge. It’s for me to collect.
ASCII by Jason Scott / Geocities

Here is more on the subject in the form of a brief history lesson and update from Jason Scott:

After my initial call-out, a nice selection of folks showed up to the Archive Team IRC channel, ranging from the offering of bandwidth and disk space or simply moral support and coding. We’ve been downloading at an enormous rate, probably along the lines of a gigabyte a half-hour of Geocities, through all our different vectors. Because we’re talking literally millions of files with an average size of 1 to 30 kilobytes, it becomes harder and harder to get a “big picture” view of everything we’ve grabbed, but after 48 hours of work, Archive Team has saved over 200,000 Geocities sites. We’re now pulling in new sites at the rate of something like 5 a second. Is that fast enough? We’ll see, won’t we.
ASCII by Jason Scott / Geocities: Lessons So Far

Finally, a new post on the progress:

So speaking of doing something, the project is now in full bore. The process of grabbing material is not the difficult part – between a small handful of folks, the 200 gigabyte-a-day number could be maintained indefinitely, but we paused for a day or two while figuring out the best places to put it, the way to handle crazy filesystem issues, and all the logistical stuff you don’t initially think about when you run naked into the snow at midnight. I think we’ve got most of that handled at this point, and as we’re rsyncing between multiple “pools” of people with the capacity to hold all this incoming stuff, it’s just awesome to see the history literally flowing through the pipes. This is a lot of data, people; as I have indicated, this is an enormous cross-section of humanity, ranging from academics and historians through to music collectors, science fiction fans, conspiracy theories and prideful craftsmen. I’ve only occasionally glanced at stuff when a funny or interesting directory name goes by, but I am rewarded heavily by what’s here. As the amount of data grows (we are somewhere in the terabyte range, I believe, but further optimizations must be done), I expect this to only get better and better.
ASCII by Jason Scott / Geocities: Why Hello, Everybody

p.s. Geocities was the first dotcom stock I owned…did ok too.