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Ghost Sites 22
----- GHOST SITES #22 [December 8, 1998]
----- by Steve Baldwin
(steve_baldwin@hotmail.com)
As this year of digital carnage and broken IPO dreams draws to a close,
Ghost Sites would like to warmly thank all of you for continuing to
support this column. Your Dead Site Tips have been invaluable, and your
readership has provided immense solace to our lonely team of
Webleologists, keeping them from utter despair (and perhaps cannibalism)
as they keep count of the failed, the fallen, and the fossils.
We expect that 1999 will be another great year of Internet Site
Ossification (ISO), and pledge to keep you fully informed of the latest
sites to succumb to it.
After all, Bit Rot never sleeps.
Note: David Blair, who runs Waxweb, has notified us that the WaxWeb site
mentioned in Ghost Sites Issue 19 has been updated since our review ran
in August. Waxweb's new content (as well as the old site, which is
archived), can be reached at http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/wax/.
*---- YOUR PERSONAL NET (REDUX) ----*
----- http://ypn.netresponse.com/DOCS/YPNWlcmt.htm
Micheal Wolff's disastrous Your Personal Net mega-site fiasco just won't
die. Ghost Sites reviewed this stillborn monster shortly after it died
11 months ago, but its restless spirit has arisen at a new location, an
event warranting its reclassification as a Site Zombie "zombie" (an
extremely dangerous, often subspecies of Ghost Site).
At http://ypn.netresponse.com/DOCS/YPNWlcmt.htm, acres of glossy,
personalized wreckage from January 1998 are available for perusal. Our
favorite area of this grim apparition is YPN's NetClock, surely the
world's most out-of-date Net event calendar, followed by its "Do You
Want to Shoot Your Boss?" feature story (we know several former YPN
employees who wanted to do exactly that after Wolff forced them through
one of the Net's most traumatic site closures).
Wolff is, of course, a wealthy man now, thanks to his royalties from
Burn Rate - a self-serving account of his attempts to take YPN public.
But as Scrooge learned, any gains made in this life are answerable to a
higher power - and the mysterious reappearance of YPN suggests this
restless Zombie may be dragging chains in the Wolff household this
Yuletide.
Related URLs:
http://ypn.netresponse.com/DOCS/netclock2/index.html
http://ypn.netresponse.com/DOCS/cvr19970/
http://www.burnrate.com/
[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum
*---- BLASPHEMYVISION ----*
----- http://www.cyberfunk.com/blasphemy/
Christopher Anderson points out that BlasphemyVision, a project claiming
to be a hard-hitting, anti-Puritan site full of "twisted humor", hasn't
been updated in many months. According to Anderson, "the whole thing is
horribly old and quite moldy. As far as I know, the only thing still
living on the whole server is the BlasphemyVision message board area,
and the absent webmaster, King George III, rarely if ever posts to it."
Say what you want about those humorless, ramrod-straight Puritans and
Christian Zealots - at least they keep their sites up-to-date (perhaps
in fear that the Messiah will suddenly arrive). In the meantime, if
you're in the mood to blaspheme something, avoid BlasphemyVision, and
resort to more traditional methods, such as USENET, the telephone, or
wall graffiti.
Related URLs:
http://www.cyberfunk.com/blasphemy/cbinfo.html
[3 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, But Well-Preserved
*---- THE PROSPERITY TIP OF THE DAY ----*
----- http://spiralup.com/prosperity/
We're sad to see this one go, because these tips were so oddly
inspiring.
The brainchild of Art Carvajal, an independent distributor of something
called "Young Living Essential Oils", the Prosperity Tips always
provided great breakfast reading, because Carvajal often advised people
to do outrageous things to save or make money, such as buying goats to
mow their lawns, becoming part-time edible landscape consultants, or
spontaneously painting house numbers on street curbs in the hope that
homeowners would pay them for this unsolicited service).
Most of the time, however, Carvajal's tips provided sensible,
no-nonsense penny-saving advice that in any rational world should have
earned him a small fortune. (Of course, in a rational world, none of us
would be struggling to raise Christmas money by reselling old neckties,
milking goats, or distributing Essential Oils).
Thanks to JBerger for this tip.
Related URLs:
http://spiralup.com/prosperity/archives.htm
[3 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, But Well-Preserved
*---- VANGELIS INFORMATION WORLD ----*
----- http://www.vangelisworld.com/
Remember Vangelis? The composer of all that inspirational, synth-heavy
music that clogged up millions of ears back in the 1980's? He's still
around, or at least his Web site is, and it's a preposterously outdated
piece of self-important puffery promising to "bring to you all, first
hand, the real information and news concerning the World of Vangelis".
The site also solemnly pledges that "for each and every subject covered,
Vangelis intends to invest his Web site an authenticity that will make
it unique as an information window".
At least Vangelis' Ghost site has the virtue of being brief - just two
moldy pages of atavistic fluff - which is more than one can say for his
interminable Techno-Shmaltz anthems.
Thanks to an anonymous user of the Ghost-O-Meter for this one.
Related URLs:
http://www.vangelisworld.com/page2.html
[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum
*---- CAFE LOS NEGROES ----*
----- http://www.cafelosnegroes.com/newz/index3.html
This New York-based site, devoted to African American culture, closed
its doors in mid-November after an unsuccessful membership drive failed
to provide the $10,000 that site founder McLean Mashingaidze Greaves
needed to keep it going.
In a poignant visual touch, Greaves illustrates his site's demise by
fading from the famous ensemble photo of Jazz greats featured in the
film "A Great Day in Harlem" to a photo of himself standing alone in the
streetscape. (Sure, this kind of inflated self-comparison is
egotistical, but isn't that what the Web is for?)
With the $6,331 in pledges that Greaves was able to raise, Cafe Los
Negroes will be going "underground", meaning its content may live on in
the shadowy world of e-mail newsletters.
Related URLs:
http://www.cafelosnegroes.com/newz/current_CLN_pledges.html
http://www.cafelosnegroes.com/images/greatday_cln_anim.gif
[3 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, But Well-Preserved
*---- DUMBASS OF THE DAY ----*
----- http://newdream.net/~sage/old/dumbass/
Also from JBerger is Dumbass of the Day, a petrified vat of vitriole,
which hit the rocks back in July shortly after its author forcefully
upbraided his loyal audience for its own "dumbassedness":
"The mail I receive from you guys about this page seems to indicate that
most everyone who sees this page sucks. I find it difficult to believe
that many of you actually take this thing seriously. Believe it or not,
sometimes I actually put some thought into my choices for the Dumbass of
the Day; sometimes I wonder if anybody ever gets my jokes."
Like the stillborn Mirsky.Com, a far more grandiose effort to cultivate
the depths of negativity in a topical, highly personal manner, Dumbass
of the Day is another victim of the Internet's awesome inability to
laugh at itself.
[4 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, Shows Advanced Decay
*---- PUSHCENTRAL ----*
----- http://www.pushcentral.com/
You won't find a more depressing site on the Web than PushCentral. In
its heyday, it attempted to be a comprehensive directory of Push
technologies, Push resources, and Push clients, but now it's just
another sad encyclopedia of broken mega-dreams from 1996 and '97.
Take a gander at its index of technologies, last updated in July of this
year - most of them were "Discontinued" or "Out of Business" on their
headstones. Similar bitrot accompanies its list of Push Publishers,
which still lists Pathfinder's doomed Personal Edition among "current"
personalized news services.
If Ghost Sites is still in business a year from now, I expect we'll find
as many failed portal sites as there are failed Push services, because
AOL/Netscape will have swallowed up every last user on the planet. But
that's a disaster that thankfully won't start to envelop us for another
few months.
Related URLs:
http://www.pushcentral.com/pushtech.html
http://www.pushcentral.com/personews.html
[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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