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Ghost Sites 13
----- GHOST SITES #13 [February 20, 1998]
----- by Steve Baldwin
(steve_baldwin@hotmail.com)
A friend of Ghost Sites recently took me to task because it seems we're
increasingly attaching our bright yellow "Condemned Website" notices on
the doors of small sites run by hobbyists and other plain folk.
"Don't turn Ghost Sites into Slander Central", this friend advises, and
he makes a good point - if the best that this column can do is attack
old sites devoted to wood burning or needlepoint, we're strafing the
wrong boats.
So I want to assure you all that Ghost Sites' orders are very clear on
this matter - our mission is "to find, identify, and attack the largest,
most lumbering, most out-of-date, most derelict sites on the Web."
If we occasionally send our torpedoes toward a small rusty trawler full
of innocent hobbyists, we are failing in our mission, which is to gun
for the big fish: the hulking 50,000 ton web sites piloted by clueless
corporate captains, money-grubbing venture capitalists, sleepy
academics, and overvisionary digiriti.
It is these malconceived HTML giants which put the Net's sea lanes in
jeopardy - not the small craft. They are not the enemy.
Agreed, crew?
Well, with that out of the way, it's time to surface.
*---- THE MILLENIUM WHOLE EARTH CATALOG ----*
----- https://www.well.net/mwec/mwec.toc.html
The Millenium Whole Earth Catalog should have made for a world-killing
web site. Based on the best-selling print compendium of touchie-feelie
technology that sold millions of copies back in the 1960's, an
electronic WEC could have been a monster on the Web - an organic,
renewable, anti-business shopping bible for today's quirky,
rumor-driven, anti-establishment Net consumers.
With just a dash of West Coast attitude and a dollop of holistic
cross-promotion in the pages of Wired, the WEC could have drawn so many
millions of eyeballs that it would have made Howard Rheingold and
Stewart Brand rich beyond their wildest wireless dreams.
But instead, we're left with this ridiculous wreck of half-completed
link pages, outdated references to early activist online resources, and
rambling prose introductions from 1994. And the site points to a
sampling of current content from the Whole Earth Review which dates from
Spring '96.
The whole mess suggests that the Whole Earth Catalogers fell asleep
before a single finished page was fetched onto WEC's secure servers. How
could these guys have dropped the ball like this?
If I had a million dollars, I'd buy the rights to the WEC tonight and
immediately pitch it to Microsoft as a kick-butt, alternative shopping
guide for '60's graybeards running Fortune 500 companies. Of all the
Ghost Sites I've seen, this one has the highest upside dollar potential
- bigger than Dr. Weil, Dr. Ruth, Web Monkey and Michael Kinsley
combined.
There's just one problem with my plan - the whole damned Internet has
deteriorated into an "alternative shopping mall" for grownups who think
like teenagers. With this much competition ahead, maybe Rheingold and
Brand were right to let the electronic WEC sink beneath the waves back
in '95.
Related URLs:
https://www.well.net/mwec/sustainability/
https://www.well.net/mwec/community/online.html
https://www.well.net/mwec/frontmatter/preface.html
https://www.well.net/mwec/wer.html
[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum
*---- CYBERPARK ----*
----- http://www.cyberpark.com/cyberpark.html
AOL killed this sprawling game site before it had a chance to collect a
cyber-penny from online gamers, leaving this twisted shell of marketing
material behind. The outfit that hatched it, WorldPlay Entertainment,
will be absorbed into AOL's Games Channel, which leaves CyberPark's 65
employees out in the cold.
Would CyberPark really have become "the new fun button on the Internet?"
We'll never know, except by leafing through its demo pages and doing a
little Monday morning quarterbacking. Ask yourself whether you'd have
actually paid money to play Baldies Online, TrophyBass2, or Spunky's
Shuffle. How many hours a week would you really have spent in
CyberPark's Body Boutique, choosing a "gender, body type, hair color and
style, skin tone, facial shape and other features to show who you really
are, or who you want to be"?
I have a simple theory about game sites like this. They fail because
there's just too much competition from the legions of truly great PC
shareware games out there. Who needs TrophyBass2 when you can play
Quake (which appeals to every redblooded American, regardless of gender,
body type, or hair color)? Want to switch sexes? You don't need a Body
Boutique - just become SusieQ at Hotmail.Com! And would the Net really
choose Spunky's Shuffle over Duke Nukem? In a pig's eye!
Seriously, AOL - if you're going to spend millions on a Gamers site,
hire some hardcore nerds to run a site chocked full of TombRaider cheats
and clues, or FlightSim 5.1 terrain patches and control panels. That's
where the money is, folks - not in Baldies Online.
CyberPark is dead, and I'm sure its jobless staff will soon begin to
tell us exactly what evil befell the project. Until they do, I offer
you this tantalizing clue lifted from a description of one of
CyberPark's stillborn games called Schwa Pyramid:
"You'll be abducted to the mysterious, mesmerizing world of Schwa
Pyramid...You'll lose track of time. You will begin to feel powerless.
Conspiracy theories and the nagging tingle of thought control and deja
vu will persist in your mind. Even loyal friends will turn on you."
If you've ever worked in New Media, you know exactly what this writer is
talking about.
Related URLs:
http://www.worldplay.com/puzzle.html
[4 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, Shows Advanced Decay
*---- THE SPOT ----*
----- http://www.thespot.com/
Thought you'd see a day when you'd be free of Carrie, Lon, Michelle,
Jeff, Jordan, and Hunter? Forget about it - these smooth-faced digital
harpies will see us all dead.
Yes folks, the ill-fated Spot site - which wowed so many "visionary"
content managers in 1995-96 that it spawned a gaggle of lookalike (and
equally doomed) soap sites, lives on today.
What's remarkable about The Spot is how much it tells us about
Hollywood's narrow, passive, and low-brow approach to Net entertainment
back in the mid-90's. The idea that the world would swarm to watch phony
people do phony things seemed a good one - after all, entire media
empires had already been built on this premise.
But when The Spot's cotton candy content failed to attract more than a
spoonful of the Net's mindshare, it sent a shocking message to the West
Coast which (amazingly) they'd never heard before. A message so
shocking and disturbing that it's still resonating among the clueless
content barons of Bel Aire: If you build something utterly stupid,
nobody will come!
Although this Ghost Site clanked to a halt in June, 1997, it still
houses some live programming elements, including live banner ads (I
wonder how much live banner ads on dead sites go for today? Half the
going rate?).
And most of The Spot's deathless prose lives on, frozen in time, for Net
historians and lit-crit grad students to pore over, including this
haunting goodbye message from Leslie, date-stamped 6/97:
"God. What is with everyone around here today? They all might as well be
draped in black and standing around a casket. Me? I'm wearing bright red
today. Lookin' good. Shakin' my groove thing. Uh-huh."
Man, I wish I could write like that.
Related URLs:
http://www.thespot.com/thespot/entries/spot97/0697/journal/m-0606-01.html
http://www.thespot.com/thespot/entries/spot97/0697/journal/goodbye.html
[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum
*---- ENTERING THE WORLD-WIDE WEB: A GUIDE TO CYBERSPACE ----*
----- http://www.hcc.hawaii.edu/guide/www.guide.html
Let your mind ease back to 1993 - a pastoral time when there were "at
least 100 hypertext Web servers in use throughout the world". Recall how
optimistic you used to be back then: the Great Content Crash of '97 was
four carefree years in the future - even the Cyberporn Scandal wasn't
yet a glimmer in the watchful eyes of Carnegie-Mellon's researchers. The
ad banner - push media - even Slate had yet to be conceived.
Yes, these were the Web's glory days, and you can eternally relive
1993's reverie of hope and unspoiled innocence, courtesy of this frozen
site at Honolulu Community College.
Like a fading photograph of a beautiful little town free of noisy
traffic, tract housing, ugly billboards, and hordes of carpetbaggers
littering the sidewalks with spam, this musty WWW Guide illustrates what
a neat place the Web used to be, before its peaceful common space was
trampled into the mud by the likes of you and me.
[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum
*---- NCSA VIRTUAL REALITY FACLITIES (sic) ----*
----- http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Viz/VR/VRHomePage.html
Okay, so they can't spell. But what's keeping NCSA's 3-D eggheads from
keeping their VR information site up-to-date? Doesn't the military
industrial complex need to know about the latest MIPS-sucking 3-D
advancements such as the ImmersaDesk and the VROOM BOOM ROOM (which
wowed 'em at SIGGRAPH '94)?
NCSA's cutting-edge site was last updated 5/22/96 - that's too long a
nap, even in a prestigious university. C'mon, you VR Jocks - don't we
deserve more than a few dusty links to the SuperComputing '95 site? Why
keep the world in the dark about this stuff? Are you helmeted geeks
afraid that we're going to laugh at your funny 3-D goggles and your odd
habit of walking into walls in dark rooms?
Of course, there's another possibility why this site is so quiet - the
whole NSCA VR staff, plus a ruggedized ImmersaDesk 2, are on a C5A
transport jet flying to the Persian Gulf.
Hell, it beats playing Quake.
[4 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, Shows Advanced Decay
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Copyright 1996-1999 Steve Baldwin Associates.
Webdesign, hosting and publication by Disobey.
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