#deleted city

[computerhistorymuseum]

Have you checked out our latest exhibit yet?

http://www.computerhistory.org/exhibits/deletedcity/

[boteoc]

Out of Oblivion, Into The Deleted City

[byrebeccat]

A Trip Down GeoCities Memory Lane

If you've been on the internet as long as I have, you probably remember GeoCities. It was thereere I first became hooked on the anything and everything that had to do with the web.  I did community tech support for nearly a year and learned more than you can imagine about html.  It was pre WYSIWYG and you had to learn code.  It is something I've never regretted. I have since strayed into the world of Joomla and WordPress, but being able to look at and understand html has helped me out of more than one situation.  I ran a crossed a site the other day called The Deleted City and much to my surprise they have the 650 GB data file backup and turned it into an amazing visualization called The Deleted City.

The following is from their website: The Deleted City is a digital archaeology of the world wide web as it exploded into the 21st century. At that time the web was often described as an enormous digital library that you could visit or contribute to by building a homepage. The early citizens of the net (or netizens) took their netizenship serious, and built homepages about themselves and subjects they were experts in. These pioneers found their brave new world at Geocities, a free webhosting provider that was modelled after a city and where you could get a free "piece of land" to build your digital home in a certain neighborhood based on the subject of your homepage. Heartland was – as a neigborhood for all things rural – by far the largest, but there were neighbourhoods for fashion, arts and far east related topics to name just a few.

Around the turn of the century, Geocities had tens of millions of "homesteaders" as the digital tennants were called and was bought by Yahoo! for three and a half billion dollars. Ten years later in 2009, as other metaphors of the internet (such as the social network) had taken over, and the homesteaders had left their properties vacant after migrating to Facebook, Geocities was shutdown and deleted. In an heroic effort to preserve 10 years of collaborative work by 35 million people, the Archive Team made a backup of the site just before it shut down. The resulting 650 Gigabyte bittorrent file is the digital Pompeii that is the subject of an interactive excavation that allows you to wander through an episode of recent online history.

Original Article

[oc-oscarcruz]

The Deleted City ¡Geocities vive! Yo recuerdo haber hecho un página para Geocities aunque nunca la subí; este pedazo de la historia del Internet se había perdido y hace bastante tiempo se intenta su recuperación en espacio público. Es una parte relevante de los inicios de la participación civil en los medios. Lo llaman arqueología digital, y la presentación muestra la interface mediante la cuál se puede explorar Geocities en su estado previo antes de ser borrado. El internet es colaborativo y libre. esto es un buen ejemplo. La pieza Loser (Beck,1994) en formato midi suena muy apropiada. www.deletedcity.com