Retrieval
Io's Millenial 2000 sites 'salvaged' from Geocities by Reocities...
"And what you're seeing here is the retrieval of human scale." -Bob Dobbs
REOCITIES Opens a Reality Wormhole to the 90s
As of Oct 09, my Millennial 2000 geocities site ionamiller.org became defunct, but
http://web.archive.org/web/20080424013637/http://www.geocities.com/iona_m/
and is fully preserved (including Virtual Tantra) at reocities.com
http://www.reocities.com/Athens/Atrium/1471/index.html
thx, to this bold and humongous effort...
Open Letter to Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo!
Install FireFox Link FixerIf you are on Twitter or facebook please pass this petition to your friends!!
dear Mrs. Bartz, Nov 2, 2009
We've never met, and probably never will, but I would like to ask your cooperation in a matter that I think is of great importance.
Somehow Yahoo! has made the decision on pulling the plug on GeoCities.
Presumably this was in order to cut costs, and improve Yahoos' profitability, which was the subject of some discussion in the last couple of months, and which led to you becoming CEO of Yahoo! in the first place.
I understand the motive and the need for Yahoo! to look after the interests of its shareholders.
Now, it is not in the power of small folks like me to influence board room decisions made at your level, but in this case I think a grave mistake has been made.
When the Taliban decided to blow up those antique statues a while ago there was worldwide uproar. Thousands upon thousands of people spoke out against it, recognized that what was lost here was a unique statement of the cultural state of mankind, a sense of loss was felt by all.
In the name of religion culture was destroyed.
And now, perhaps unwittingly, Yahoo! has committed a similar act. When those statues were blown up it was clearly an act of vandalism. That we are not in our lifetimes going to travel to Afghanistan to see them is a small detail.
But Yahoo! GeoCities pages were a monument too, and were accessible to (and accessed by) millions from all over the world. It was not just a business unit, it was something that mankind made, that Yahoo! had custody over.
It was a monument that stood as testimony to the birth of the World Wide Web, something that will surely occupy the scholars of the future. To Yahoo! it may have simply been a bunch of bits on some hard disks. But to humanity is was much more than that.
In the name of commerce culture was destroyed.
In the business world there is plenty of precedent for the donation of unwanted items to musea, and this is a prime opportunity for Yahoo! to show it really cares about the content that its users entrust it with, and what to do with content once a web business is no longer viable.
I can't believe that once this has been pointed out to you that you will not recognize the truth of it, and I urgently ask you to do one of the following things:
- re-open GeoCities in a 'read only' mode, possibly under a different name, in order to cut down on the traffic, to preserve the data for generations to come
- cooperate with archive.org, reocities.com, or any one of a number of entities that want to save this unique data for the future
If you don't do that you run the risk of being mentioned right alongside the Taliban, and that's not a place in history worth having.
It doesn't cost you anything, and mankind will be grateful to you for ever.
Yours Sincerely,
Sign this petition with your name,location and/or email address:
Insert Sub Header Here
Yahoo! has done an amazing thing by keeping GeoCities alive for as long as they did, but we feel that it is a waste to leave the Internet with a hole of this magnitude. At a minimum, Yahoo! could have simply left GeoCities as a monument to the early days.
Maybe close it off from editing and simply make it static after getting rid of the spam pages once and for all.
Behind this minimalistic page stretches a wealth of Internet history. If any of it was yours and we have successfully recovered it, then we hope it makes you happy to see it restored.
We've rebuilt the walls to the Cities and the streets where a large part of the early settlers of the World Wide Web used to live in. You can still find them where they were before, but not all of the houses have been rebuilt yet.
As time passes, we will try to recover more and more of what was lost, at least as much as is technically possible. If you wish to help with this effort, and you have your old GeoCities content backed up, then please email us at j@ww.com, but *not* before we've stopped importing the data that we have right now.
If you have a website that links to old GeoCities content, and we've managed to restore that content, we would like to ask you to change the links from Geocities.com to Reocities.com. It's just a one letter change and it will help the Internet to hang together that much better.
To fix links pointing to old GeoCities pages, we provide you with a small Firefox Greasemonkey script. That's not as good as having the links fixed on the pages themselves, but until people get around to that, it's a good thing to have. It saves you from getting error messages or landing in places that you didn't intend.
We do not have a 'FAQ' section yet, but if there is one question that keeps popping up in my mailbox it is this one:
Why do it ? Why not let it go away, it was all junk anyway.
In the millions of pages that we've archived, there are plenty of treasures. To make the point I'll link to one page of a person that died way too young and whose lasting contribution to the internet and all our future lives would have been lost without saving it somehow. *That* is why we did this.
Not all of the pages here, or the story behind them are as moving as this one, but all of them together represent a wealth whose value will only become more apparent over time, and which we hope will remain with us forever in some way.
Davelicious' David Feinman, with thanks to Sylvia
I hope that answer the 'why?' of it conclusively.
Unfortunately, we currently cannot offer you a way to update, delete, or add pages. We don't know who the original uploaders were (we are working on a verification method) and have no access to the account credentials. We are still in the process of cleaning up pages to restore them to their former glory. Given the amount of data, we expect that this process will take a while. In the mean time, feel free to explore. You probably know your way better around here than we do, but if you need some guidance, have a look at the neighborhoods listing.
Insert Another Sub Header Here
