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Ghost Sites 05
----- GHOST SITES #5 [October 3, 1996]
----- by Steve Baldwin
(steve_baldwin@hotmail.com)
The web has been bashed as a godless postmodern medium, but a recent
spate of miraculous site resurrections suggests the opposite: the
Supernatural at Work.
How else to explain the spectacular reincarnation of a dead site like
Web Review, which roared back to life with a Bacchanalian re-launch
party in San Francisco. And Pathfinder's own OJ Central, moribund for
months -- why does it now hum with news of the civic trial? Even
Valujet's planes are flying again - and its new web site looks, well,
surprisingly airworthy.
Who, or what, is "re-animating" these dead sites? Is it genuine
Redemption or a sinister plot to replace the "souls" of these sites with
ActiveX. Please stay tuned -- in the meantime, here's this week's dead
sites: with any luck at all, they'll have the good sense to stay dead.
Oh, and in our very next issue, Ghost Sites will launch its Halloween
Special - please check in: I promise you a very scary time.
*---- THE HOLDEN CAULFIELD SERVER ----*
----- http://www.stardot.com/~lukeseem/holden/
Whenever I feel oppressed by the phoniness of the world, a few moments
with The Holden Caulfield Server would jolt me out of my blues. I'd
simply click a "submit" button and an inspired quote from J.D.
Salinger's memorably screwed-up teenager would pop onto my screen -- a
perfect use of web technology to enhance an old book and make it
compelling for today's troubled cyberteens.
Early this year, however, reclusive author Salinger pressured Luke
Seeman to kill the site or face an expensive copyright infringement
suit. Yeah, Salinger was right to defend his copyright -- but the whole
sad affair makes me want to paraphrase Holden: "In every info
superhighway I've gone to, all the intellectual property bastards stick
together."
[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum
*---- JEF'S NUDE OF THE MONTH ----*
----- http://www.well.com/user/jef/nude.html
Think you're going to make a mint selling porn on the net? Hah! It's
more likely that you'll be driven into the poorhouse, especially if your
ISP charges you by the megabyte. Witness the cautionary tale of Jef
Poskanzer, whose nudes were so popular that the Well was about to start
charging him $750 per month if the popular nudes stayed online. They
didn't, Poskanzer is now shopping for a cheaper ISP, and all you
thrill-seekers can always check out The Louvre if you're in a lusty
mood.
Chris Stamper is credited with this find. He can be reached at
Stamper.Com.
[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum
*---- THE WAY: GOPHERSPACE ----*
----- http://www.infohiway.com/way/gof/c1.html
As my colleague Chris Stamper notes, Gopherspace has been fatally
injured by the rise of the Web, search engines and other info-gimmicks.
Try it yourself: go to "The Way" and click on any of the venerable
gophers which used to offer such a wealth of information. At least half
of them are dead: the others seem frozen in 1995 or before.
What's left in Gopherspace? To quote Stamper, "old Hotwired press
releases, Lubavitcher tracts, and obscure syllabi from the 1993 Bard
Physics department. It's sad but true. The crypt of Gopherspace makes
the web's ghost sites look up to date."
Of course, the death of Gopherspace means the death of Archie, Veronica,
and Jughead, too, but I find this latter topic much too painful to
discuss.
[4 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, shows Advanced Decay
*---- THE MENTOS FAQ ----
----- http://www3.gseis.ucla.edu/~cjones/mentos/mentos-faq.html
Certain Net fads spread like wildfire and then come to a screeching
halt: witness the moribund Mentos FAQ page, which added its last morsel
of Mentos-memorabilia in November of 1995. Why these artificial mints
became such a fevered subject of discussion is beyond me -- nor can I
explain why everyone suddenly packed up and stopped writing about
Mentos.
I suspect that demonstrating a comprehensive knowledge of Mentos
suddenly became decidedly uncool on the West Coast, or some other
artificial food came along to steal the conversational fire. In any
case, I can only hope that the prestigious UCLA Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies, which hosts this site, will
commission an academic study committee to achieve some closure on this
issue.
Related URLs: http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/intro.html
[3 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, but Well-Preserved
*---- SOVEREIGN SEVEN ----*
----- http://www.pathfinder.com/S7/s7preview.html
This odd little site, based on a DC Comics series, is a real collector's
item that's been buried deep within Pathfinder for almost a year.
Created by talented web designer Matt Menko (unrelated to the artificial
mint) Sovereign Seven was launched with great fanfare and left to slowly
sink into oblivion.
This is a strange site laced with major web nostalgia: Where else can
you enjoy authentic server-push animation, scanned-in covers, a flaky
and somewhat dysfunctional interactive "maze" game.
I doubt this site will ever be as valuable as a 1941 Superman First
Edition, but I'd recommend copying this site to your archive as soon as
possible. In 50 years, copies of this site will be quite rare, and
they're not making any more of them.
Related URLs: http://www.pathfinder.com/S7/1_1.html
[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum
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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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