Preserving what some consider a crucial period for the Web, Archive Team is offering "a significant percentage" of the sites hosted for free by Web hosting service GeoCities as a torrent.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In an effort to preserve some of the crucial history of the Web, Jason Scott’s Archive Team (www.archiveteam.org) has migrated “a significant percentage” of sites hosted by Yahoo’s (www.yahoo.com) long-standing free Web hosting service, GeoCities (geocities.yahoo.com), following its shut down more than a year ago.
Created in 1994, GeoCities was a free Web-hosting service that was, for many people, their first experience with creating their own websites. Yahoo bought GeoCities in early 1999, but closed it in 2009.
The Archive Team has since worked to compile the homeless sites, and will release a 900-gigabyte torrent of as much of GeoCities as it can.
Countless critics have pointed out that not all of GeoCities is worth saving (including British tech publication the Register), however, one can argue that there is a value to keeping alive pages from the nascent Web.
“What we were facing, you see, was the wholesale destruction of the still-rare combination of words digital heritage, the erasing and silencing of hundreds of thousands of voices, voices that representing the dawn of what one might call “regular people” joining the World Wide Web,” Archive Team wrote. “A unique moment in human history, preserved for many years and spontaneously combusting due to a few marks in a ledger, the decision of who-knows for who-knows-what.”
One of the messages Archive Team is also given the opportunity to present, given their efforts to keep Geocities data alive, is essentially that backing up data is important. Archive Team made this clear with the tip: “BACK UP YOUR DATA!” appropriately spelled out in a flickering animated gif – a symbol often associated with GeoCities sites.
“[W]ebsites and hosting services should not be ‘fads’ any more than forests and cities should be fads – they represent countless hours of writing, of editing, of thinking, of creating,” Archive Team continued. “They represent their time, and they represent the thoughts and dreams of people now much older, or gone completely. There’s history here. Real, honest, true history.”
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