GeoCities

Before I can explain how one might excavate from GeoCities, I, and by I, I mean chat-gpt, should explain what it is, for those of you who aren’t in the know: GeoCities was a web hosting service that made it possible for people to create their own websites and publish them on the Internet. Launched in 1994, it was one of the first platforms of its kind, allowing users to build custom web pages and host them for free. Each user’s site was categorized into different “cities” based on the website’s content theme.

GeoCities became immensely popular in the late 1990s as a platform for personal expression and for sharing hobbies, interests, and personal information. At its peak, it was one of the most visited sites on the Internet. However, its popularity waned with the advent of more modern social media platforms and blogging services.

Yahoo! acquired GeoCities in 1999, but due to declining usage and the shift towards other platforms, Yahoo! announced the closure of GeoCities in 2009, and the U.S. service was officially shut down in the same year. The closure of GeoCities marked the end of an early era of internet culture, where individual creativity and web design experimentation were widely accessible to the general public. Some efforts have been made to archive and preserve the content of GeoCities websites for historical and cultural preservation.

Method of Excavation

Thanks chat-gpt! I would like to point your attention to that final line: “Some efforts have been made to archive and preserve the content of GeoCities websites for historical and cultural preservation.” This is where our journey begins. Using services such as GifCities by Internet Archive and OoCities, amongst others, we can access this ancient part of internet history.

I would just like to comment on the nature of this excavation method. Most of these archives, such as wayback machine for example, are broken, slow, and incomplete. Which means links that lead no where and image elements with no files attached to them. I find this all the more charming. I equate this to actual archeology, where a whole skeleton is reconstructed from a finding of several bones. Or a piece of pottery from a few pieces of broken shards. You get the picture. Every dead end makes an actual finding even more exciting. Makes you think about what’s out there that we don’t know about, or rather how little we do know, both digitally and irl. /yap-sesh over.

Closing Thoughts

Recently I have encountered this touching meme:

You’ll notice I’ll put a lot of emphasis on aesthetically pleasing pictures in these blog posts, but you need to remember that more importantly, behind each and every picture there is a story. The likelyhood of us ever knowing that story is slim to non. And yet, you could still feel that dimension of history in them. The Lightshot Project scrapes images from circa mid-2010’s. GeoCities predates these by up to two decades. In internet terms, that’s more than archaic. If only these images could talk, the stories they would tell…