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Ghost Sites 17
----- GHOST SITES #17 [July 5, 1998]
----- by Steve Baldwin
(steve_baldwin@hotmail.com)
Summer is traditionally a time when many dead web sites float to the
surface and foul the Web's futuristic beaches. Why? Site decay
accelerates in July and August because most of us have much better
things to do: dorm-room HTML'ers are out swimming laps, editorial types
are drinking hard liquor in the Hamptons, and the rest of us would
probably rather stumble across a fresh nest of yellowjackets than update
our "What's New" pages.
So please, folks - don't let summer fun cause you to neglect your poor
little web site. When you're not lying senseless on the beach, or
dodging leeches and black flies at the lake, give your site some
attention! Unless you feed it a couple of updates, it'll grow hungry and
gnarly like the vengeful electronic creature lurking in one of those
awful Giga Pets.
Speaking of summer, this month, Ghost Sites celebrates its 2nd erratic
year of providing its distressing Web Obituary service to the Internet.
Thank you all for keeping this project alive (more or less).
Now, good friends, it's time to explore this month's catch of Ghost
Sites - a truly evil-smelling "red tide" of digital decay.
*---- LUCKMAN'S BEST OF THE WEB ----*
----- http://www.bofw.com/
Luckman is a software company whose newest product is Web Sweep, "a new
Internet cleanup utility for Windows 95/NT that can automatically and
safely remove all the 'junk files' transferred to your hard drive during
every Internet session."
The problem is that Luckman's own site contains a megaton of web junk in
the form of its seriously outdated "Best of the Web" directory - a
towering pile of moldy site reviews which seems to have been assembled
in mid-1996 and promptly forgotten about. Check out Luckman's Current
Entertainment Events section and you'll see pointers to the 1995 World
Series, the 1996 Olympics, and Cannes '96. Luckman's directory also
contains a broken search engine, many outdated links, and megabytes of
ancient thumbnails depicting sites long departed or redesigned.
I suspect we need something more powerful than WebSweep to clean up a
mess this bad.
Related URLs:
http://www.bofw.com/cat150.html
http://www.bofw.com/search.html
[4 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, Shows Advanced Decay
*---- STIM ----*
----- http://www.stim.com/
Back in May of '96, Prodigy launched Stim - an ill-fated e-zine which
sought to serve up "deviant pop culture" to 20-something Net users.
Stim was designed by what Prodigy called "a crack team" of editorial
visionaries drawn from MTV, glossy magazines such as Hotwired and
Mondo2000, and CD-ROM publishing.
The result was a hopelessly self-conscious pastiche of "tech toys, beefy
editorial content, cool graphics, original animation, and swanky sounds"
that cost about $1 Million to produce, but which made about as much
sense as a wind-driven browser.
Stim's other deviant pop culture elements included "The Elektric Friends
Knetwurk", cutesy animated characters called "the STIMples", and an
application called "The Hose", which, like a deranged Push Client,
apparently sprayed the user's screen with random information.
I don't know about you, but if I had $1 Million dollars, I'd probably
spend it a little differently.
Related URLs:
http://www.stim.com/staph.html
http://www.prodigy.com/download/releases/stim.htm
[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum
*---- WORLDDREAMING ----*
----- http://www.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~windeatr/dreamMosaic.html
Much of the Web's early experimental flavor lives on at worldDreaming, a
surrealistic exercise in online dream research that's been in a coma for
a full year. Once, however, worldDreaming was a lively gathering place
for people to e-mail their dreams to the public, and its archives
contain a full complement of disturbing user-submitted dreams involving
large-fish, dental operation nightmares, and Antonio Bandaras.
Smack in the middle of these weird psychic adventures is a 1996 E-mail
press release from Hotwired announcing the launch of Packet - a truly
disastrous pipe-dream from the brain of HotWired's Louis Rossetto.
Thanks to M.L. Maurer for pointing out this site to us.
Related URLs:
http://www.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~windeatr/worldDream/0035.html
[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum
*---- PUSHCONCEPTS ----*
----- http://www.pushconcepts.com/pushres.htm
Remember Push Media? Like the three-cylinder steam engine, this radical
new technology was supposed to make the Web more efficient, faster, and
smoother for the user to navigate (why go out and hunt for something
when the Web can just blast it across your monitor?).
Unfortunately, Push didn't really work out as planned. Network
administrators hated it's appetite for bandwidth, users were confused by
its confusing mishmash of screen saver, ticker tape, and ad banners, and
before long, many of its backers, which included IFusion, FreeLoader,
Pointcast, Marimaba, BackWeb, and Castenet, were crushed by Wall
Street's indifference to this gee-wiz technology that didn't really work
so well.
Push technology survives, of course - and it's becoming a more mature,
more useful adjunct to all the silly searching and surfing which we do
each day. But its days of glory are gone - and PushConcepts - a site
devoted to promoting all things Push, flat-lined in September of 1997.
[4 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, Shows Advanced Decay
*---- DIS.ORG ----*
----- http://www.dis.org/
Sinister. Weird. Dead. That's all that we care to say about the
decaying ruins of DIS.ORG - a mysterious West Coast organization of
leather-clad hackers and shadowy "consultants" who look like a posse of
truly dangerous desperadoes.
Because we've been mail-bombed before (not by DIS), we know we're
treading on thin ice by pointing out that DIS.ORG hasn't been updated in
six months, and that its home page contains a rash of ugly broken links.
But we also know that these upstanding young men are probably too busy
engaged in secret government projects (ours or theirs) to worry about
little things like updating their web site.
Related URLs:
http://www.dis.org/shipley/
[3 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, but Well-Preserved
*---- DREAMSHOP ----*
----- http://www.dreamshop.com/
How the mighty have fallen. Dreamshop was a pioneering Web shopping
site that once sat proudly on Pathfinder's servers, providing electronic
representation to big-name retailers including Spiegel, Eddie Bauer, The
Sharper Image, and the Bombay Company. But if you go to
www.dreamshop.com today, all prospective shoppers will see is an ominous
black screen announcing "Finally! We have received the longed for
investments! This gives us the opportunity to move the dreamshop.com
from the old and slow UIP servers. The new system will be based on a
super-fast NT server with IIS 4.0 and SQL server."
Will DreamShop's shuttered storefront reopen once its shiny IIS servers
are up and running? Or does the fact that Eddie Bauer, the Sharper
Image, and other former DreamShop mainstays have their own sites make
DreamShop irrelevant?
[2 GHOSTIES] Site is Dying in ICU
*---- PATHFINDER'S KIDSTUFF ----*
----- http://www.pathfinder.com/pathfinder/kidstuff/kidstuff.html
Years ago, when "Web portals" weren't even a buzzword, Time-Warner's
Pathfinder site attempted to mold its magazine-driven content into a
one-stop infomart that would be so compelling that people would shun the
rest of the Net.
While only history can judge whether Pathfinder's proto-portalism
efforts were successful, its crazy-quilt content building during
Pathfinder's great expansion period (mid-1995 to late-1996) has provided
a real windfall to Web archaeologists, who are continually discovering
priceless content artifacts concealed within Pathfinder's shifting
sands.
One recently unearthed rarity is Pathfinder's KidStuff: a relic that
scientists have carbon-dated to mid-October, 1995. KidStuff reflects an
early attempt by Pathfinder to colonize the Kids market for commercial
trading. (The fact that this market never really emerged is in no small
part due to the schoolmarmish efforts of the FTC, and other
privacy-coddling groups, but that's another story).
The keystone of KidsStuff was Underwater World: a gallery of gigantic
GIFs hosted by one Freddy Fish which was unfortunately destroyed in an
ill-conceived 1997 site cleaning. Only Kidstuff's fragile outer shell
remains, concealing a gaggle of broken links.
Like the Lost Continent of Atlantis, the more scientists dig around the
early ruins of Pathfinder, the more mysterious and baffling the whole
thing seems.
[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum
*---- SATURNWORLD ----*
----- http://www.saturnworld.com/jsmid/index.html
Britain Woodman is a regular contributor to Ghost Sites, and one dark
night he stumbled across the SaturnWorld 'site: a truly scary example of
what happens when you hitch your editorial wagon to a defunct game
platform (the Sega Saturn). This doomed site's date stamp still reads
"February 6, 1998": the fateful day that its backers (Imagine Games
Network) shunted its editors off to other projects, leaving this
handsome hulk adrift like a high-tech Flying Dutchman.
Even though SaturnWorld is down, it's not completely out - the site is
advertising for freelance game geeks willing to board the wreck and get
her under steam. Any takers?
[3 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, but Well-Preserved
*---- THE LAND OF KOHMU ----*
----- http://www.cyberenet.net/~kohmu/
Instead of letting their web site starve to death, Kohmu's creators,
Manning L. Krull and Mitchell Young, decided to execute it in a macabre
public ceremony: "All of the graphics have been converted to grayscale
(including our entire art gallery, which looks really weird and somehow
sad in black and white...) all the text has been converted to a bleary
gray, and all updates to the page have been halted".
Krull and Young's Kevorkian flair might seem to be cruel, but their
willingness to sacrifice a site they loved gives them both an
opportunity to live happier lives. Without the Land of Kohmu draining
all their time and resources, both have begun to lead normal lives
again.
In Krull's last update, date-stamped 2/28/98, he mentions that he's now
able to spend more time with his girlfriend, adding "When it comes to
choosing between writing a bunch of nonsense for you folks or hanging
out with her, you guys lose every time. Sorry, that's just how it is."
And that's about the happiest ending that I can imagine for any Ghost
Site.
See you in August, people!
Related URLs:
http://www.cyberenet.net/~kohmu/props.htm
http://www.cyberenet.net/~kohmu/loquacit.html
[4 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, Shows Advanced Decay
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The website edition includes images, a nice design, and all the latest
news about Ghost Sites. Go there to read the latest:
http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/
Copyright 1996-1999 Steve Baldwin Associates.
Webdesign, hosting and publication by Disobey.
http://www.disobey.com/
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