Interview with Jason Scott regarding Geocities

Huffduffed by lach on July 13th, 2011

This is a collection of Geocities data downloaded by a bunch of people who call themselves ARCHIVE TEAM, who began scraping the Yahoo! Geocities site during a six month period in 2009, before Yahoo! shut down geocities.com on October 26th, 2009.

At the time of the purchase, Geocities was the THIRD most popular website on the Internet. Even by the time of its shutdown, it was in the top 250. We don’t have complete rock-solid knowledge of why it was shut down, but all signs point to Yahoo! trying to get back to basics (like, uh, having a huge audience?) and Geocities magically didn’t fall into this new "focus", and lacked any internal cheerleader to make it last through meetings.

Yahoo! succeeded in destroying the most amount of history in the shortest amount of time, certainly on purpose, in known memory. Millions of files, user accounts, all gone.

http://www.archive.org/details/2009-archiveteam-geocities-part1

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  1. Interview with Jason Scott regarding Geocities

    —Huffduffed by adactio on May 7th, 2011

  2. Interview with Jason Scott regarding Geocities

    —Huffduffed by sechilds on May 13th, 2011

Possibly related…

  1. The Archive Team

    Most of us think nothing of putting our lives in the cloud; photos in Flickr, videos on YouTube, most everything on Facebook. But what about when those services abruptly go away, taking all of our collective contributions with them? Well Jason Scott operates on the assumption that everything online will one day disappear. He explains to Bob why he and the Archive Team are dedicated to saving user-generated content for posterity.

    GUESTS: Jason Scott

    HOSTED BY: Bob Garfield

    http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/mar/23/archive-team/

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    —Huffduffed by adactio one year ago

  2. The Save Button Ruined Everything: Backing Up Our Digital Heritage

    Jason Scott is a man on a mission — save all the things.

    But what does “save” mean in the modern world, in the waterfall of personal and private data, and where do we even begin? Turning on the history-o-matic, Jason provides a backdrop to our attempts to “save”, what has been done, and what we can do. The talk will be fast-paced and loud, like a hard drive at the end of its life.

    http://2012.dconstruct.org/conference/scott/

    Jason Scott is a force of nature, tirelessly dedicated to preserving our digital history, from old-school game manuals to the latest social networking sites hell-bent on sucking our collective culture into “the cloud.”

    He is also a documentary film maker. He made BBS: The Documentary and Get Lamp, all about text adventure games.

    In the run-up to the destruction of Geocities, Jason set up Archive Team, a collective of volunteers who back up first and ask questions later. He now works for the Internet Archive, though he is at pains to point out that he does not speak for them.

    And yet, despite all his achievements, Jason will probably never be as well-known as his cat Sockington, who has over a million followers on Twitter.

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    —Huffduffed by dConstruct 8 months ago

  3. Preserving the Creative Culture of the Web — Jason Scott, Kari Kraus, Nick Hasty

    For over 20 years the web has provided continuous deluge of cultural production. Digital artifacts such as websites, images, and videos have much to communicate about our social and cultural evolution, and yet their messages or moments can be fleeting or quickly lost. Both the accessibility and longevity of digital content are subject to a wide range of risks, from technological obsolescence to outright deletion by their creator or host. So what is being done to preserve these cultural objects for the long term? Approaching web content from a cultural and artistic perspective, this panel will convene leading writers, archivists, thinkers and technologists to discuss to the questions, challenges, and imperatives involving preserving the creative culture of the web. We’ll cover topics like "what is the long-term significance of a website, and why would it be worth preserving?", "should web sites and artifacts be treated like works of art or architecture?", and "how do we go about archiving digital content to ensure its accessibility and longevity?". Example initiatives to be discussed will be the Archive Team’s various projects (such as the Geocities torrent), the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, Internet Archeology, and the Rhizome ArtBase. This panel will be presented by Rhizome, an organization dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology.

    http://www.archive.org/details/PreservingTheCreativeCultureOfTheWeb

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    —Huffduffed by adactio one year ago