geocities
Latest
Yahoo Japan is shutting down the last remnants of GeoCities
Yahoo Japan, the last enclave of GeoCities, is scrapping the beloved website-hosting service. In March 2019 -- 22 years after its original launch -- GeoCities will be extinct, according to Quartz. Yahoo, which bought the platform in 1999 for $3.57 billion in stock, announced the closure on its Japanese website, citing profitability and technological issues. As a result, Yahoo "regrets" that all the GeoCities content -- compartmentalized into "neighborhoods", as is the norm -- will be wiped from the web along with it.
‘Hypnospace Outlaw’ is GeoCities moderator, the game
If you used the internet in the mid-to-late 90s, you probably remember GeoCities. Bright, garish webpages full of animated glitter and barely readable text. It was a different time, before Facebook, Twitter and anything resembling an ephemeral 'story.'
Search for classic GIFs in the Internet Archive's new collection
To celebrate its 20th anniversary, the Internet Archive has created a special treat for its visitors: an utterly enormous number of GIFs culled from the original social network, GeoCities. Fittingly, the new collection is dubbed the Geocities Animated Gif Search Engine or GifCities for short. It features a whopping 4,500,000 animated GIFs from the classic internet era of the mid '90s. Even though Yahoo shut down the service in 2009, each of these GIFs links back to its originating page via the Wayback Machine -- just as with the National Archive's collection.
The Perfect Ten: Obnoxious studio buzz words
So say that you write for Massively. Or say that you work for another news site while wistfully refreshing Massively's front page hoping to see a "we're hiring!" notice pop up. Or say that you're a two-headed frog that has a respectable blog that one head writes for while the other one eats flies. The important thing for this example is to imagine that you write news. Because you write news, a good chunk of your day is spent prowling for stories. Some of them you find while browsing. Some of them are sent to your email. Once in a great while your cell phone registers a call from California and a way-too-peppy voice tries to sell you on the notion of writing a 2000-word feature on a game that only the mole people have heard of. In all of this, you are exposed to a great amount of PR-speak. You see the same phrases pop up, again and again. You understand how words can be hollow shells wrapped around a complete lack of meaning. You start to go mad until your other head tells you to snap out of it and eat some more flies. So today you're going to join me here on this side of the news desk as we look at 10 of the most obnoxious buzz words or phrases that studio PR and devs like to toss our way. You could get really cynical reading this list, but I suggest that you make a bingo sheet instead to turn this into a fun game that never, ever ends!
The Deleted City visualizes GeoCities as it was, today
GeoCities may be no more, but, unlike some other bits of internet past, its entire contents were thoroughly archived before the site was completely shut down in 2009. That opened up some interesting possibilities for anyone interested in playing around with the 650 gigabyte archive, and this so-called "Deleted City" project may well be the most interesting yet. Described as a "digital archaeology of the world wide web as it exploded into the 21st century," the project appropriately visualized GeoCities as one large city, which can be dived into and explored at will (complete with a soundtrack supplied by "nearby" MIDI files). Unfortunately, it's not clear when or if folks will actually be able to try it out for themselves, but you can at least take a guided tour in the video after the break.
