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Ghost Sites 18
----- GHOST SITES #18 [August 6, 1998]
----- by Steve Baldwin
(steve_baldwin@hotmail.com)
Welcome to the August issue of Ghost Sites of the Web, your monthly
report on sites whose tragic deaths are under-reported, over-looked, and
otherwise ignored by a Pollyannish computer press.
First of all, I want to deny the wild rumors that have been circulating
in highly unreliable Net circles that Ghost Sites will soon be sold to
The Zapata Corporation for an undisclosed sum Notwithstanding the
obvious synergy obtaining between dead sites and dead fish, none of
these rumors is true, and I want to personally assure you that Ghost
Sites will happily remain a key component of Disobey.Com's "portal" into
the world of dread, decay, and of course, disobedience.
We do have a correction to make pertaining to our review of the
HyperDiscordia site which ran in November of last year. According to
HyperDiscordia's Web master, one Pope Icky Fundament, his organization
in fact regularly places new material on the site, but naturally, does
its utmost to conceal this fact from the non-Illuminati. As a result,
our reviewer missed HyperDiscordia's fresh areas, and made a wrong call.
So I would encourage all of you seeking higher knowledge to revisit
HyperDiscordia, to see "what's new under the sun".
Related URLs:
http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/whats_really_new.html
*---- THE NET MAGAZINE (THE ULTIMATE INTERNET GUIDE) ----*
----- http://www.thenet-usa.com/
Perhaps we're overly jaded, but we're mighty suspicious of sites that
announce they're taking a "brief hiatus from publishing". In our
experience, "hiatus" is HR-speak for "shutdown", "layoff", or
"bloodbath". The term's only possible justification is to make
employees scrambling for the lifeboats feel calmer as they row away from
the wreck.
When I took a good look inside The Net, it became clear to me that this
site has been on "hiatus" for quite some time. The site's current
Features page links to content from September of 1997, its 100 Best
Sites of the Year was clearly crafted more than a year ago, and its Web
design tips pages date from June of that same year.
Perhaps we should believe The Net's bubbly copy claiming it will someday
return to "astound and delight the entire Internet community." But I
think it's more likely that George McGovern will someday become
President.
Related URLs:
http://www.thenet-usa.com/feature/feature.html
http://www.thenet-usa.com/bestblue/bestof.html
http://www.thenet-usa.com/feature/june97/build/coolprac.html
[3 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, But Well-Preserved
*---- NETVOYAGE ----*
----- http://www.dotdotcom.com/projects/netvoyage/
Wall Street's wacky love affair with "Web Portals" might come to a
screeching halt if more investors knew about the dead portal sites
gathering barnacles on the floor of the Web's cruel seas.
NetVoyage is one such site, and despite its designers' improbable claim
that in its day, NetVoyage was "the talk of the town", its sinking seems
to have escaped the press's attention, which is sad, given how much this
site tells us about today's "portalization" craze.
Take a close look at NetVoyage's waterlogged corpse, and you can see
many elements of today's "revolutionary" portal sites: categorized links
(Yahoo, Excite, Netscape), a section where users could build execrable
home pages (Geocities, Tripod, The Globe), a Business area and a Kids
area (just about everybody).
We're not crazy enough to suggest that Yahoo, Excite, or Geocities will
soon go the way of NetVoyage. We only point out the obvious fact that
many sites hoping to crawl to the top by becoming "one stop
destinations" took one-way trips to Davy Jones' Locker when traffic
failed to materialize.
Related URLs:
http://www.dotdotcom.com/projects/netvoyage/links.html
http://www.dotdotcom.com/projects/netvoyage/subscriber.html
http://www.dotdotcom.com/projects/netvoyage/business.html
http://www.dotdotcom.com/projects/netvoyage/kidzone.html
[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum
*---- ELVIS SIGHTINGS SINCE AUGUST 12, 1977 ----*
----- http://www.elvissightings.com/
Last summer, Elvis fever launched a thousand spangled cyber-shrines to
the King. While many of these sites still exist, quite a few have
either gotten moldy or closed their doors entirely as the Web's hordes
of necromaniacs flocked to sites commemorating Princess Di's demise.
Elvis Sightings has been "temporarily closed" for many months now ("to
better preserve Elvis's memory"), but its mysterious death should not
overshadow the fact that it will live on in our hearts - forever.
[3 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, but Well-Preserved
*---- AFTERLIFE.ORG ----*
----- http://www.afterlife.org/
David Blatner had a wonderful idea: provide a site that archives your
web page after you die. This way, your great-grandchildren can say
"Great Grandma really knew how to use Photoshop, didn't she?"
But as Ghost Site correspondent David Mediavilla Ezquibela observes,
AfterLife.Org is currently a virtual crypt without any clients.
Why aren't people lining up to bequeath their web pages to posterity?
Well, the sad truth is that most people with home pages are probably
fearful of the impression their crummy Geocities site will make on
future generations ("you mean that Grandma was really shallow enough to
waste the best years of her life building the Ultimate Madonna Links
Page?", little Norbert will ask in 2050). (I don't know about you, but
I've built enough stupid HTML pages in my life to truthfully say that
I'd pay someone to destroy them, to spare my progeny's progeny the pain
of knowing who their grandfather really was!)
So we're doubtful about Blatner's long-term prospects, especially
because AfterLife.Org isn't exactly responsive -- we've been waiting for
four months to get a reply from Blatner about why AfterLife.Org still
hasn't got a single digital stiff under a slab.
Maybe someone should archive AfterLife.Org, just in case...
Related URLs:
http://www.afterlife.org/about.html
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/4517/
[4 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, but Well-Preserved
*---- THE CREATOR ----*
----- http://www.euronet.nl/users/mistered/editor.html
This is one of the saddest testaments to the web's collective
imagination we've ever seen. The idea here is that you (the user) can
reconfigure the site's home pages, and thus create a "communal" site
that functions as a real-time graffiti board of cyber-thought for all
the world to see.
Neat idea, but three years after its launch, this bold interactivity
experiment is broken, underpatronized, and downright derelict .
Although the site's second and fourth page seem to have been graced with
fresh user-supplied content, its first and third pages haven't been
modified in more than a year.
[4 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, Shows Advanced Decay
*---- THE CONVERGENCE ----*
----- http://www.theconvergence.com/
This slickly designed Canadian site ran smoothly from January to
December 1997, and then plunged into a coma. The site was conceived by
K.K. Campbell to look forward to "that day when all media -- books,
movies, music, virtual reality, newspapers, TV, whatever -- will be
equally accessible from the same spot." Despite Campbell's futuristic
intentions, the only things converging on this site right now are flies.
Perhaps the most frightening aspect of The Convergence is its eerie
"Countdown to the Year 2000" section, which stopped ticking back in late
January 1997. (I know more than a few people who've been spooked enough
by the Y2K bug to believe we'd all be better off if The Convergence's
stopped clock were correct).
Thanks to Haynes Lee for notifying us of The Convergence's eternal sleep.
Related URLs:
http://www.theconvergence.com/features/publisher/
http://www.theconvergence.com/900d/about.shtml
[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum
*---- PLANET ART ----*
----- http://www.artplanet.com/
Not much to say about this one, except to note that we've never seen so
many lovely ODBC errors on one page.
Even if Art Planet's dysfunctional home page (which now reads "More Than
0 Artists and Galleries Listing Over 0 Works!") is a conceptual art
experiment, or a low-key protest about bugs in Microsoft's database
engine, we'll continue to seek our art elsewhere.
[4 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, Shows Advanced Decay
*---- TED NUGENT: STRANGLEHOLD ----*
----- http://www.thewild.com/jngonzo/nuge.html
We don't like to pick on fan sites, but this egregiously outdated
unofficial shrine to Ted ("Wango Tango") Nugent is a heavy metal
rustbucket whose oxidized elements include a 1997 Summer concert
calendar and an expired chat channel.
Compensating somewhat for this site's depraved atavism is its rich
archive of Nugent nostalgia, including a gaggle of chest-thumping
interviews with Ted, whose underappreciated contributions to Western
Culture include "My Love is Like a Tire Iron".
Related URLs:
http://www.thewild.com/jngonzo/tour.html
http://www.thewild.com/jngonzo/chat.html
http://www.thewild.com/jngonzo/songtrup.txt
http://www.thewild.com/jngonzo/songmlil.txt
[3 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, but Well-Preserved
*---- BERKELEY'S CINEMASPACE ----*
----- http://cinemaspace.berkeley.edu/
More than seventeen months have elapsed since Berkeley's deep-thinking
film studies site stopped posting pithy monographs whose pretentious
titles include "Cinematic Mapping and Hypertext Dispersion" and
"Nation and Narrativity on the Starship Enterprise".
Although Cinema Space is a moribund site, it's not completely dead -
recently, a link to NY's Underground Film Festival was added, proving
that somebody at Berkeley still cares about happens to this rusty oasis
of academic-speak.
Related URLs:
http://cinemaspace.berkeley.edu/Papers/CityOfSadness/table.html
http://cinemaspace.berkeley.edu/Papers/Walden/walden.toc.html
[2 GHOSTIES] Site is Dying in ICU
*---- THE CORPORATION ----*
----- http://www.thecorporation.com/
Good satirical writing seems to be an endangered species on the Net;
witness the fate of The Corporation: a hilarious parody of Corporate
America that hasn't been updated in an alarmingly long time.
Fearing that The Corporation might have actually succumbed to its own
bureaucratic inertia, we e-mailed its PR Department, and after about 10
days, received an answer from one of the conglomerate's underpaid career
flaks, Reedber Jones, who begged us to wait a few days until The
Corporation could whip up a press release explaining the site's
quiescence.
We waited and waited, and on August 3rd, Jones finally got executive
approval to put the release up, and it makes for depressing reading.
Apparently, a frivolous lawsuit against The Corporation has pierced the
heart of one of America's greatest blue chip companies, and has resulted
in a near-complete shutdown of one of the Net's most dependable sources
of humor.
Special thanks to David White for keeping tabs on The Corporation's
continuing litigation struggles.
Related URLs:
http://www.thecorporation.com/orient/orient.html
http://www.thecorporation.com/pressrelease/pressrelease.html
[1 GHOSTIE] Site is Calling in Sick
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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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