Archive Team has been having a hard time saying goodbye to GeoCities since it faded away last week.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In an effort to save the thousands of animated GIFs, blinking text, web rings and even useful websites from going offline forever, Jason Scott’s Archive Team (www.archiveteam.org) it trying to migrate sites hosted by Yahoo!’s (www.yahoo.com) long-standing free web hosting service, GeoCities (geocities.yahoo.com), following its shut down last week.
Scott began the website as an “offloading point and information depot” for a range of website and data archiving projects, but has gained the most attention for its effort to save GeoCities, which is emblematic of the early stages of the Internet. Scott estimates that he is archiving the web’s adolescence at a rate of around a gigabyte every half-hour, or about five websites a second. After 48 hours of work, the Archive Team has saved more than 200,000 Geocities websites.
According to his webpage, Scott’s love for online antiquity began in childhood. “Since I was 9 years old, I have had a fervent love of computers and technology, bounded only by realities of economics and time,” Scott wrote. “From the BBS world of the 80′s to the early wonders of the Internet and to the web and beyond, I’ve dabbled and dosed myself in whatever hot new computing fads and freakishness this wonderful world could come up with.”
While critics have pointed out that not all of GeoCities is worth saving, many would agree with Scott that there is a value to keeping the disorganized, oftentimes embarrassing mass of mostly personal websites alive “to spread the feelings, horrors and astonishments of computing’s history to people who came into it late, or never came into it at all.”
