ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND WEBSITES, SOON TO DIE

Did you ever make a website, upon first having the internet, just to have a website? I did. This was much before any every-day-people-blogging came along, and certainly before you could get to know somebody over the internet by searching for a profile. Building a website, for me, was a way to extend your existence (as it still is for many people, of course). And even though I didn't really know what I was going to put on it, I was determined to have one.

Inspired by small independent Canadian rock bands (such as Svelte) to make a space of my own, where I could create my own scene and there was plenty of room, I made a website on Geocities in 2002, three years after they were bought up by Yahoo. If you're so inclined, you can go take a look at the old thing. It's un-cluttered, it's pretty clean. Looking back, it was the launch-pad for a lot of my current e-designing habits: I still love the minimalist white page with black lettering, I still post pictures at the top of articles for no-one in particular, and I still use song-lyrics as headlines.

Anyway, Geocities is closing it's doors on October 26th. I can't fathom why: surely Yahoo can afford to keep a bunch of hokey, old websites standing? According to some Q&A they have posted, the corporation has "decided to focus on helping [their] customers explore and build relationships online in other ways." Of course! Clear away all that self-expressing, amateur crap to make way for a new social-networking revolution, why didn't we consider that in the first place?

I don't know if I can find the right number, but that basically means that a bucket big enough to hold Mars filled with personal websites are going to vanish into thin-air in one month's time. Isn't that fucking sad? Sure, people have the opportunity to save their websites, to download all their old files and HTML layouts and put them up somewhere else, but who is actually going to do that? Nobody has that time. Most people, like me, have embarrassing, modest websites that they don't deem deserving of redemption. But embarrassing, modest things should be preserved, shouldn't they? Yes, one may argue that there are typically non-profit websites like Archive.org that spend time maintaining dusty or done websites, but they won't cover everyone.

Who will preserve our e-History when we're gone?