Archive Team Is Busy Saving Geocities 267
jamie found this note from Jason Scott, who organizes the Archive Team. They are busy downloading as much of Geocities as they can before it vanishes from the Net after Yahoo pulled the plug. (Note: that textfiles.com link is a good candidate for Readability.) "..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. ... A side-effect of the whole process is I now know way, way, way too much [sic] about Geocities than I ever expected to. We've had to dissect every aspect of how the site functions to understand how to mirror things, from its history through how it does crazy javascript ads. Some of it is stupid and some is hilarious... We think we have most every site from 1999 and before on Geocities that was left. ... It is more important to me to grab the data than to figure out how to serve it later. People who have been talking about copyright and stuff seem to think I'm going to sell it or take credit or some crap. I don't see how the final collection won't end up online, but how is elusive — maybe a torrent of a bunch of zip files, or as a curated collection, or as a bunch of hard drives. However it is, I'll make sure people can get it, somehow."
Re:And nothing of value was archived (Score:5, Informative)
Uh. We already have repeated it. Myspace is basically last couple of years' geocities.
Now there's the web 2.0 boom which is the geocities of the future. Except, instead of small personals sites with blinking gif animations, you have big sites with horrible AJAX interfaces that completely breaks page navigation. Yes, this applies to big websites like slashdot and freshmeat as well.
What the hell? What was wrong with the old slashcode? The difference for the end user is that now you have to click 10 times to do what you could do in one click in the web 1.0 version.
The lesson to be learn is that you shouldn't fix what isn't broken.
Now I'll get back to my rocking chair. I've got kids to keep off the lawn.
Re:At that rate... (Score:5, Informative)
"You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars *next* year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in sixty years."
Re:Don't forget (Score:4, Informative)
firefox still supports the blink :D
Re:Don't forget (Score:1, Informative)
sadly if the guy is not reproducing the bitch is more productive....
Re:We should not let this happen. (Score:3, Informative)
Isn't anybody going to move a finger, while a significant part of our collective history disappears forever?
Yes, the Archive guys are lifting their finger 5 times every second and archiving them.
Don't make me say that RTF thing.
Re:At that rate... (Score:2, Informative)
The technology environment is not likely to change more in the next forty years than it has in the last forty.
:-)
To those who say Geocities has nothing of value... (Score:4, Informative)
Here is just one example of content on Geocities that has value.
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/8682/ [geocities.com]
These old documents are still of value to people modding the old games.
Re:Don't forget (Score:5, Informative)
Until I found about:config, browser.blink_allowed.
Re:Needed? (Score:3, Informative)
>internet wayback machine
who do you think archive.org is?
And google cache is strictly short term.