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Ghost Sites 12
----- GHOST SITES #12 [January 21, 1998]
----- by Steve Baldwin
(steve_baldwin@hotmail.com)
What do the Nation of Islam, the Association of Libertarian Feminists,
and the Promise Keepers have in common? Each of these activist groups
maintain enormous stockpiles of incredible, time-warping Ghost Pages
that haven't been updated in years.
Should we be alarmed by these hidden arsenals of rusty rhetoric? Does
the passage of time defuse the ideology encased in these dumpsters of
ancient HTML, or could these old tracts be re-armed and redeployed in a
crisis? Until Ghost Site's HTML Inspectors gain full access to these
sites, our Skeleton Crew sleeps in 4-hour shifts.
On a lighter note, we'd like to raise a toast to Ghost Site's small but
dedicated army of Dead Site Hunters. Without your contributions - your
moth-eaten bookmarks, horror tales of New Media projects gone terribly
awry, and other anecdotes and artifacts of Net decay, we'd have become
dust many months ago.
Until Ghost Sites can more meaningfully thank you (i.e. shower you with
cash, T-Shirts, coffee mugs, etc.), we humbly offer you this Special
Issue, in which just about every dead URL was exhumed by you - our loyal
readers.
Here's to you, reader and Ghost Site Hunter - your contributions are
well beyond the call of duty, safe surfing, and quite possibly sanity!
*---- POWERAGENT ----*
----- http://www.poweragent.com/
Robin Mayhall has an interest in advertising and marketing, so it was
natural that she bookmarked PowerAgent last summer. This lavishly
appointed, sprawling site touted a new "one-to-one", agent-driven,
gee-whiz shopping service guaranteed to wow web marketers and consumers
when it launched in the Fall of 1997.
But Mayhall noticed something terribly odd when she surfed back to
PowerAgent in early 1998, and saw the "Coming Fall 1997" GIF again. And
her mouse hand began to shake in fear when she clicked on the links to
PowerAgent's Management and Sales Team and saw them splinter into
pieces. What terrible disaster had happened here?
After a bit of digging, Ghost Sites came across an ominous article in a
September issue of Advertising Age hinting that PowerAgent's investors
might be having second thoughts about coughing up the $20 Million
necessary to get PowerAgent out of drydock. Other gloomy anecdotal
evidence suggested that the worst might indeed have happened - that the
suitcases of cash, if they ever arrived, were too late to revive the
PowerAgent site from its endless sleep.
Ghost Sites doesn't purport to know what PowerAgent is worth, or whether
it will ever wake from its coma. We can only ask: what the heck's the
matter with venture capitalists today? Isn't $20 Million a fair price
to pay for PowerAgent's excellent collection of Retro 1950's graphics?
Related URLs:
http://www.poweragent.com/consumer/images/triangle3.gif
http://www.adage.com/interactive/articles/19970915/article8.html
http://services.netpreneur.org/hypermail/ad-market/0063.html
http://www.marketer.poweragent.com/partner/partner_splash.htm
[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum
*---- THE ASSOCIATION OF LIBERTARIAN FEMINISTS, THE MILLION MAN MARCH
(1995), THE PROMISE KEEPER'S "STAND IN THE GAP" MARCH ON WASHINGTON
(1997) ----*
----- http://www.alf.org/
----- http://www.noi.org/March/index.html
----- http://www2.promisekeepers.org/manual/sitg/rtimage/
When Liz Linton, of Sweet Briar College, tipped us that the Association
of Libertarian Feminists site had been abandoned, she opened up a
troublesome can of worms. As suspected, ALF is stone dead (the site's
last update occurred in August 1996, shortly before its webmaster,
author Joan Kennedy Taylor, gave up on it to pursue a more rewarding
career on the lecture circuit).
But Linton's tip put us in a quandary - if Ghost Sites slammed
Libertarian Feminists, weren't we morally obligated to say a few words
about how men were royally mucking the Net up with their male-oriented
HTML rubbish? So after a bit of digging we came up with a small bit of
verifiable proof that site negligence is indeed a trans-gender issue.
Witness the registration page from the Nation of Islam's Million Man
March Information Center. What are we to make of the urgent call to
register for an event that came and went 25 months ago? With all due
respect, Mr. Farrakhan, a small bit of atoning is in order here. And
how about those Promise Keepers? What are we to make of a "live" image
from the PK march whose frozen date stamp reads Oct 4, 1997:18:56:53.
Really, Mr. McCartney - this moldy page made me want to break down and
cry!
Unfortunately, all too many activist sites (left, right, or whatever)
seem to base their concept of a web site on the "floating billboard"
model: a disembodied, soulless, one-way clump of HTML that stays up
forever. Unless activists become more active in keeping their sites
current, my bet is that the next revolution will leave them all in the
dust.
[3 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, but Well-Preserved
*---- MOVIE VIEW ----*
----- http://www.movieview.com/
Mark W. Evans stubbed his browser on the corpse of Movie View - one of
the most severely damaged sites we've seen. Movie View, in an example
of extremely wishful thinking, proclaims itself "constantly changing and
developing and with every change we aim to improve this site".
Predictably, the only half-hearted sign of change/development we saw
appears on the site's U.S. Top 10 Page, where the webmaster's cryptic
instruction "Rufus to Provide Copy" appears in a final note of
desperation. But Rufus, like Godot, never did show up to provide the
golden film reviews that might have put Movie View on the map, and the
site sank beneath the waves in 1996 with a full cargo of empty
framesets.
Related URLs:
http://www.movieview.com/TOPTEN/USTop10.htm
[4 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, Shows Advanced Decay
*---- YOUR MOM ----*
----- http://www.yourmom.com/
From Mike Schmidt comes news that the site known as Your MoM has fetched
its last file. To their credit, the unfortunates who ran Your Mom were
prescient enough to offer Posterity a modest, self-penned obituary: "For
those of you who haven't noticed, Your MoM has been dead for the last
two years. Feel free to enjoy what is left, but don't expect anything
new."
Enjoying Your MoM, however, is a tall order. I suspect that this
execrably pre-adolescent, post-literate site is really the product of a
cadre of calculating grownups eager to cash in on what Old Media types
used to call "Youth Culture" (they now call it "Net Culture"). If so,
Your MoM is just the latest adaptation of the same evil youth
exploitation impulses which, in their prior analog incarnations, earlier
generations lavishly-produced works by David Cassidy, Menudo, New Kids
on the Block, and lately, Hanson. A bad kidrock song goes by in three
minutes, but a bad kidweb site is forever. As we all know, trash like
Your MoM tends to become as permanent as Mount Rushmore, which really
isn't fair to the kids (who will someday have to explain this site to
their first employer).
(Note: Your MoM is a small crumbling part of a much vaster, largely
decrepit teen megasite known as TAPOnline, which Ghost Sites hopes to
cover in more detail in future issues.)
[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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