beancounters

Gonna miss geocities?

Geocities is closing today!

Time is up for Yahoo Inc.'s scheduled closing of perhaps the most significant virtual museum in recent history. Years ago a central meeting place for a massive chunk of American Web surfers, GeoCities will lock its doors and take millions of pages offline.

GeoCities allowed anyone to build a custom Web page for free and reserved a small amount of virtual storage to keep pictures and documents. It was perhaps the first mainstream example of an open, participatory and personal Internet.

At the turn of the century, GeoCities was nearly ubiquitous. Fathers created websites about their families; kids created sites about Pokemon; teenage girls created sites about the Backstreet Boys. Practically every facet of culture was documented and thanks to search engines, easily accessible.

All of those documents are about to disappear.

I remember the 90s, when you couldn't search for song lyrics or game cheats or even a restaurant's menu without running into one of those attrocious orange and green neon pages. I never worked with it myself, but respected those (few, very few) who could actually produce a readable page. 

Maybe Yahoo should offer to cache some or all of the old pages somewhere. I mean, apart from what is available in the Wayback Machine. We need an internet museum.

(xkcd's commemorative Geocities page)

Verily, a URL

This morning I just downloaded FoxyURL, the FF gadget that turns longer URLs into short ones. I think it'll work well; a nice clean button has appeared on my top row next to the Google search window, for ease of teh clickz, so am looking forward to creating short URLs for Twitter in fewer steps.

On the other hand, I could adopt a completely different attitude and use DickensURL. This is a new service that turns ordinary URLs into lengthy Dickens quotes. The URLs are still workable, too, meaning you can annoy your Twitter and blog friends in a whole new way.

Twitpic test

Trying to learn the ins and outs of Twitpic this morning. So far I have learned how to take a picture on my camera phone. (Here is Daisy teaching Sam doggie yoga.) I can upload pics to Twitpic and to Twitter, and have them show up. But I can't convince either platform that they should post the tweet I include with each pic. Heckheckheckheckheck. Soliciting advice here.

Would Shakespeare have telephoned?

Following Maureen Dowd's condescending interview with the founders of Twitter, Fritinancy envisioned how Ms. Dowd might have reacted to that controversial new device, the telephone.

ME: Did you know you were designing a toy for bored housewives and the indolent rich?

BELL: Actually, I was trying to help deaf people.

ME: I heard about a woman who telephoned her husband to say she was in the throes of childbirth. Whatever happened to private pain?

WATSON: (Inaudible.)

We bow to our new (web)masters

Anthony can't get over the way Woolfcamp works.

Am I to understand that all these people responding to your blog posting are all--so to speak--IN THE SAME ROOM WITH YOU? And yet they can only talk to you via the internet?

I think Skynet has already won the war. Not even Linda Hamilton can save us!