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Ghost Sites 10
----- GHOST SITES #10 [December 1, 1997]
----- by Steve Baldwin
(steve_baldwin@hotmail.com)
Layoffs at Hotwired. A bloodbath rumored at CNet. Cool Site of the Day
on the rocks. A cruel, winnowing ice storm is blowing through the Net,
and many of yesterday's once unassailable Web sites are fighting for
their lives.
Many say that the age of experimentalism is over - that it's time for
the Web to grow up and start earning a living -- that the world won't
shed a tear for the legions of half-baked and half-cocked sites now
lying in ruins.
At Ghost Sites, we try to avoid long-winded discussions of how we got
ourselves into this awful mess. We're not here to speechify -- we're
here to wield a shovel and play Taps for dead web sites. Someday,
perhaps when the Web becomes civilized enough to bury its own dead,
we'll move on to happier pursuits.
But not now. There's too much digging to do.
*---- YOUR PERSONAL NET ----*
----- http://www.ypn.com/
This glossy dead megasite, whose bland but efficient design owes much to
Rupert Murdoch's long-dead iGuide, really had me fooled. YPN's pages
look current, and its date stamps methodically tick over every 24-hours.
But Your Personal Net is as moribund as they come - nothing has changed
here in almost 11 months.
Check out YPN's current Web Soaps feature - it was produced last
January. Ditto with its feature on Net Gaming, and its "Spotlight" on
the X Files. What terrible thing happened at YPN? Was the entire
editorial staff wiped out in a fiery bus crash? We'll probably never
know.
With no past and a disappearing future, YPN is an extraordinarily
ghoulish Ghost Site that probably won't be around much longer. Surfing
through it is a chilling experience you won't want to attempt alone.
Related URLS:
http://www.ypn.com/mm-bin/genobject/article/cover19970122
http://http://www.ypn.com/mm-bin/genobject/article/cover19970129
[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum
*---- JOHN PERRY BARLOW'S HOME PAGE ----*
----- http://http://www.eff.org/~barlow/
The last time I saw John Perry Barlow, he was speeding away from a posh
corporate retreat in a stretch limo with a fat lecture check in hand. A
few minutes earlier, Barlow had terrified a roomful of New Media barons
with the news that the Net would destroy their meatspace empires by the
year 2000. Now, he was heading back to the limitless digital horizons of
Wyoming, a bit richer but no less self-righteous.
With Barlow so busy reaping megabucks on the lecture circuit hawking his
unique brand of gloom and doom, it's no surprise that his home page
hasn't been updated in ages. The site's most recent sample of his
writings is from February 1996 - most of his other tracts are from the
early '90's, and his homepage link to Wyoming, his state of birth, is
broken.
I wouldn't probably slam Barlow for site neglect if he weren't such a
high-profile pundit who should know better. In his famous Declaration of
the Independence of Cyberspace, Barlow wrote: "On behalf of the future,
I ask you of the past to leave us alone".
Leave us alone to do what? Let our sites rot like cow-pies?
Related URLs:
http://www.eff.org/~barlow/library.html
http://www.eff.org/pub/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/barlow_0296.declaration
[3 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, but Well-Preserved
*---- CYBERORGANIC ----*
----- http://www.cyberorganic.com/
Seeing CyberOrganic - once (according to its own copy) the hottest,
youngest, hippest place since the Garden of Eden - enter a deathspin
doesn't auger well for San Francisco's New Media Scene. Witness the fate
of two of Cyberorganic's pivotal content areas - The Couch: a
voyeuristic weekly look at the inner lives of eight "artsy" New Yorkers,
and Geek Cereal: yet another daily "real-life" soap opera. Both sections
have gone to seed -- The Couch sessions trail off in August; Geek
Cereal's last daily update was over a month ago.
J. Caleb Donaldson, the outgoing "Gardener-in-Chief" of Geek Cereal,
blames a lack of postings and internal disputes concerning the site's
direction for his site's death -- most ominously, he points to
"Cyberorganic's uncertain fate looming over my efforts", and a
conceptual "bad taste in our mouths for months."
We wish more authors of failed sites would be as honest as Donaldson in
explaining their sites' cause of death. With so many dead, unburied
sites around, finding one with a proper headstone is a treat.
Related URLs:
http://www.thecouch.com/
http://www.geekcereal.com/today.html
[2 GHOSTIES] Site is Dying in ICU
*---- SKURP'S PLACE ----*
----- http://www.anet-chi.com/~dsweir/
What's the Net good for, if it can't accommodate a dyspeptic site like
Skurp's Place: a "Last Angry Man"-style soapbox for miscellaneous
musings and bilious essays on web design? Not much, according to Skurp,
who's eloquent last rant has the flavor of a modern-day Moses chastising
his errant flock:
"I am finding it increasingly difficult to find content that I believe
is of some use to anyone who visits the site... (web pages) are all the
same, too many graphics, colors that don't match, nasty backgrounds, and
god awful animated gifs. It has become a panacea of sameness. There is
no individuality."
Fare thee well, Brother Skurp. The Web tried individuality - and it
didn't work.
[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum
*---- THE NETIZEN ON TV ----*
----- http://www.hotwired.com/netizen/tv/96/44/index4a.html
The short, unhappy history of The Netizen on TV - the first and last
public affairs TV show born on the Internet - is beyond the scope of
this simple obituary column. Suffice it to say that Netizen lit few
fires, curled up alone, and died in the darkness.
Somehow, however, the original promo pages for this doomed TV show
survive on Hotwired. From these optimistic documents, it's possible to
project what this show would have become: a never-ending carousel of
smooth-skinned futurists predicting the demise of the nation-state, the
rise of the digital nation, and the democratization of power, money and
violence.
Notwithstanding all this New Age techno-boosterism, not one of
HotWired's far-seeing pundits foresaw what this page would become within
a mere year: a dank repository of links to fired Hotwired executives,
closed discussion threads, and decaying futuristic rhetoric.
Related URLs:
http://www.hotwired.com/netizen/tv/96/44/bios/weir.html
http://threads.hotwired.com/cgi-bin/interact/threads?netizentv
[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum
*---- PATHFINDER's BLIZZARD OF '96 AND UNABOMBER FEATURES ----*
----- http://pathfinder.com/pathfinder/features/blizzard/snow.html
----- http://pathfinder.com/pathfinder/features/unabomber/
The Blizzard of '96 was a terrible thing. It froze people to death,
paralyzed eight Eastern states, caused massive traffic jams, and even
seems to have frozen some Web servers - the only reasonable explanation
for why this crusty Pathfinder feature is still warning America that
"It's not over yet."
What's poignant about this site (aside from its classic early Pathfinder
navigational GIFs), is how it typifies the kind of "fast and dirty"
journalism which Pathfinder dabbled in during its heady early days.
Sure, this stuff was ugly, inconsistent, and frequently fell short of
the mark. But it wasn't soulless in the way that today's lookalike news
sites are.
Which brings us to Pathfinder's Unabomber: Tightening the Net - another
crusty fossil from years past. If any mothballed site deserves
recommissioning, it's this one, now that the Kaczynsky trial is
underway. But Pathfinder stopped updating it sometime in 1996 (possibly
because they forgot the site still existed).
In so doing, they missed out on what could have been the Net's biggest
exploitation site since O.J. Central.
Related URLs:
http://pathfinder.com/pathfinder/features/blizzard/pathbutton.gif
[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum
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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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