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Ghost Sites 11
----- GHOST SITES #11 [January 1, 1998]
----- by Steve Baldwin
(steve_baldwin@hotmail.com)
Hunting for dead web sites is a grim business that's more akin to
electronic grave-robbing than anything else. But once in a thousand
clicks, we run across sites whose "unexplained" behavior suggests
supernatural forces at work.
What else but the supernatural could explain how an obscure, ice-cold
Webcam in Germany could serve as a portal back through time, or why
spectral merrymakers at a Christmas party from two years ago are still
whooping it up on the Web? Or why the joyful spirit of COMDEX '94 still
has the power to move us in strange ways?
With these mysteries in mind, Ghost Sites of the Web wishes you a joyful
Holiday Season and a Happy New Year - may the sites you launch in '98
enjoy happy lives (even if they're brief).
*---- GEEK SITE OF THE DAY ----*
----- http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~indigo/gsotd/
The geeks of the world lost a brave friend when Scott Ruthfield stopped
updating his Geek Site of the Day site in early November.
For more than two years, GSOTD took us where no mainstream site review
service dared - into the fascinating, quirky world of sites typified by
those devoted to Kite Aerial Photography and The 5.25-inch Floppy Disk
Sleeve Archive.
Ruthfield didn't care how ugly a site looked - only that its kernel was
pure and obscure. And so GSOTD became a far more interesting site than
Cool Site of the Day, whose vague and muddled "coolness" criteria often
put site beauty before brains.
Losing GSOTD suggests the worst about what this medium has become: a
bland wasteland of billboards and general-interest content driven by the
cash imperative. As a consolation of sorts, Ruthfield is preserving
GSOTD, and will leave it up as a reminder of how interesting the Web was
in its Golden Age.
Special thanks to Lindsay Marshall for notifying us of GSOTD's demise.
Related URLs:
http://www.coolsiteoftheday.com/
[3 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, but Well-Preserved
*---- MUNGO PARK ----*
----- http://www.mungopark.com/
The deathwatch on Microsoft's Mungo Park travel site is official - the
software giant's once-friendly accountants will cut its throat some time
in February for "belt-tightening" reasons.
Nobody knows how much money Mungo Park cost Microsoft, but one can
easily imagine the suitcases of cash required to send Martha Stewart,
Stephanie Powers, and Dr. Ruth all over the world to serve as "special
Web correspondents" in safari gear.
The "Spruce Goose" of dead web sites, Mungo Park was an idea that should
have been killed immediately. Who at Microsoft seriously believed that
today's pale, cubicle-bound Net audience would enjoy watching suntanned
celebrities galavanting through the 3rd World on lavish expense
accounts?
Ghost Sites doesn't grieve for the faceless coders who built Mungo Park
- or for endangered Microsoft staffs elsewhere, such as those working on
Cinemania. They'll all be reabsorbed and reassimilated into Microsoft's
octopus-like content machine.
But we wish the bean-counters in Redmond would find it in their hearts
to preserve an acre or two of the failed Mungo Park to serve as a
monument to the Web's "go go" era of meglomaniacal content schemes, mad
spending, and self-serving junketeering.
[2 GHOSTIES] Site is Dying in ICU
*---- THE ROTTACH-EGERN WEB CAB ----*
----- http://www.topin.ch/de/wallbergbahn/welcome-eng.xhtml
High atop Mount Wallberg, a dead "live" web cam twists in the wind.
Here, on the fateful morning of January 4th, 1996, this unfortunate
camera "froze" after the temperature reached a chilly -4.5 Celsius, (a
condition which normally would cause a broken image or blank screen to
appear on the cam's web page).
But somehow - miraculously - this malfunctioning camera's unmoving,
all-seeing eye continues to serve up a never-ending chain of images from
Rottarch-Egern -- a remote, impassable land of eternal Winter where time
stands still for all eternity.
This beautiful, enigmatic Ghost Site, discovered by Dana Rottach,
summons forth a sense of longing and loss that is almost unbearable.
[3 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, but Well-Preserved
*---- A DAY AT COMDEX '94 ----*
----- http://www.halcyon.com/comdex/welcome.htm
Before the Web came along, COMDEX was on a one-way trip to the depths of
silliness and hedonistic seediness, and David Geller's A Day at Comdex
1994 captures the mindless spirit of that nadir year of '94 better than
any graduate-level thesis of the 21st Century will.
Geller's virtual vision of Comdex '94 tour doesn't show us much classic
technology, but does give us a bizarre, almost Fellini-like parade of
technology-enhanced Penthouse Pets, fat males in virtual reality
helmets, hideous 3D eyeware, and ill-fated OS/2 boosterism. In a few
grainy screenshots, Geller captures the vacuity, the greed, and
essential loneliness of Comdex that's very nearly poetic.
But Geller didn't stop here - he was back in Vegas in early '95, armed
with his Quicktake 100, to record a second virtual tour of the 1995 CES
(the Consumer Electronics Show). Did a fleet of airplanes really fly
over Vegas towing Microsoft BOB banners? Did 3DO ever really run on a
PC? Were we really convinced that MagicLink and MagicCap were going to
take over the world?
Yes.
[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum
*---- TIME DIGITAL ----*
----- http://pathfinder.com/time/digital/
David Gallagher was kind enough to find this ancient site lurking on
Pathfinder's servers - a site so old that I had forgotten about it. An
early frames-based site now entering its third year of digital
non-updatedness, Time Digital went "live" (or at least, went up) in
November 1995, to serve as a digital counterpart to a special
advertising supplement in the print magazine of the same name.
To my knowledge (I was at Time Inc. at the time), there were never any
plans to keep it rolling along - TD was a "one-shot" that served its
purpose and, in any self-respecting medium, would now be landfill.
Yet Time Digital persists, with live advertisements, (although it's
starting to fray as a new generation of browsers gags on its
proprietary, Netscape 2.0-optimized HTML). Its breathless reporting
about the new Be-Box computer, the hottest new Macs, and that young,
idealistic Web upstart called Suck.Com are all melancholy reminders of
how much we've aged - the innocence we've lost - in a mere 25 months.
[4 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, Shows Advanced Decay
*---- FATASS.COM ----*
----- http://www.fatass.com/
Ghost Sites of the Web is a family-oriented feature (unless the next
generation is taught to avoid the great Web publishing disasters of our
time, what hope can the future bear?), so it is with great trepidation
that we point to this moldy site, which possesses a singularly
unpleasant domain name.
Fatass.com is a wrenchingly ordinary collection of snapshots documenting
the activities of a group of anonymous young Americans who, in the
mid-1990's, crossed and recrossed the globe behaving like
quintessentially Ugly Americans. From Portugal to Paris, they drank,
smoked cigars, and behaved the way young Americans generally do -
partying all the way, at Christmas parties, bachelor parties, and
weddings.
Who were these people? Did they consent to being depicted for all the
world to see in such advanced states of debauchery? Why did the party
end in late 1995?
Like a maddening Beckett play, Fatass.Com is a Ghost Site that leaves us
with nothing - no coherent narrative, no intelligent questions to ask -
just empty, unidentified images dealt at random from a strange, unwanted
deck.
Special thanks to Britain P. Woodman for being the first to enter the
tomb of Fatass.Com and report back on its contents.
[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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