Net Cemetery 56
Ant wrote to us regarding coverage of the .com dead - the Net Cemetery. It's a fun piece, which gets into the problems of covering and reviewing a medium that's changing everyday. If you're into wandering through the .com wasteland, you should also check out Ghost Sites, which does a great job of "museumifing" (sounds like transmorgify) the same type of sites.
Who would've thought? (Score:5)
zoza.com? What do you think of when you heard 'zoza.com'. That's right, absofuckinglutely nothing.
bigwords.com. what's their motto, 'tired of only being able to buy a vowel?' your guide to antidisestablishmentarianism? helping you recover from Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanicconiosis? Who cares now, they've been
Floccipoccinihilipilificated.
carorder.com, because not only do you want to buy your car online, you want to buy it from someplace you've never heard of before.
elingo.com, for all your jargon needs!
icecreamvan.com. no, i'm not kidding.
popawheelie.com, because popping wheelies in real life is dangerous, and in potential violation of traffic laws.
while nobody here likes high unemployment in the tech sector, the fact of the matter is, it's not exactly shocking that most of these places died, nor is it particularly sad to see most of them go.
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transmorgify (Score:1)
I'm sorry, your use of the word "transmorgify" is typo-squatting on the reverend and honorable Transmogrify project [sourceforge.net]. Our lawyers will be contacting you about this violation of the Digital Mercurial Camelride Act.
Re:I'd rather see (Score:1)
Yup, nobody else on slashdot feels this way...
I think the rest of us would rather NOT have to see it. It'd be nice to hear that it existed though - there are things that just aren't healthy to look at.... :-)
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Re:Not entirely accurate (Score:2)
The funny thing is while other
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Slashdot R.I.P. (Score:3)
We'll be mourning or ridiculing that one too
in no time.
long way to go (Score:1)
Wow, if we lost suck, feed, slashdot and salon all in the course of a month...how would I ever waste time at work?
On the other hand, I'm sure slashdot would have no trouble finding a new home.
Now, how about the others? (Score:1)
The "bad" economy will begin to feed on itself if the only articles published focus on failed businesses and bankruptcy.
Re:Who would've thought? (Score:1)
Re:Who would've thought? (Score:1)
Haiku (Score:2)
would fade like the morning mist
but for this website [disobey.com]
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Re:Not entirely accurate (Score:2)
From their FAQ [reel.com]:
Hollywood Entertainment Corporation has decided to get out of the e-commerce business, but not the movie content business. In other words, we will continue to publish the best movie content site on the Web, but movie orders through Reel.com will be fulfilled by an e-commerce partner, Buy.com. Reel.com will continue as a premier destination for film-related content, commerce, and community. Through the Reel.com Web site, consumers can access an entertaining environment filled with a wide variety of film-related information designed to help consumers select movies to purchase, rent, or watch in theaters.
Not entirely accurate (Score:3)
*shrug*
Aside from that, it's impressive how many of these companies went belly up... and it's FAR from a complete listing. Of course, now the industry as a whole is getting swamped by newly-unemployed job candidates, venture capital has dried up, and all the suriving companies are either taking cost-saving measures or are clinging onto life. I know it's fun to laugh at this stuff, but even for the seemingly secure working professionals out there, this changes the face of the industry for a while, and not for the better.
Makes me wish I skipped college to get in on the speculative bubble. (Don't flame saying I shouldn't have wished that - cause I got flamed last week for saying that my college education was very solid, because I don't have all the practical skills that someone from a "Learn Java Quick" course has)...
Re: Online metal companies hit hard (Score:1)
Aha, a final resting place for suck (Score:1)
Money wasn't down the drain... IMO (Score:3)
Sure, there might have been a few .coms that literally burnt money, but...
Also, on F*ckedCompany during the last month, the hardest hit companies are online metal companies. Yes, people selling iron, aluminium, nickel and whatnot. Maybe this is because people who buy metal (do you?) just kept on using their local scrapyard?
Re:toobad. (Score:2)
How many dot.coms at this site did you work for? (Score:2)
Runestar
Like the Vietnam Wall Memorial in DC (Score:2)
I randomly scrolled down.
There the name was. How uncanny.
The company was there and it brought it all back like it was yesterday (it was yesterday actually): The helicopters (games), the fighting, the blood and guts, our asshole commander in chief.
Re:Who would've thought? (Score:1)
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Lord Nimon
still interesting (Score:1)
I agree there's not much value I can see in the goatse.cx sites etc but the very fact they exist is information in itself. It may be that somebody in 50 years would be interested in the basic statistics of how many sites covered what subjects - or may be writing a document on permissive societies and how different cultures allowed different displays of explicit images. Or maybe a technical research into advertising in subcultural sites. I don't know, you don't know. That's one of the interesting things about historical research, often things are of value for completely different reasons than they were saved.
For example, there are many books which have been preserved and while the content itself is of little value, the physical make up of the objects themselves is very exciting to bookbinders and industrial archaeologists...
it's all worth preserving (Score:4)
There's a lot of rubbish on the net. We all know it. We know there's lots of absolute rubbish. But in the same way that that archaeologists get really excited about unearthing ancient rubbish pits and have wonderful skills at pulling together information from them to find out about real lives from history, who knows what the dead websites of today will provide for information gatherers of tomorrow?
We can't tell what the future will want to look at from our present. Right now we're not even saving the good stuff. We need to seriously think about archiving up the web for future generations. I was one of a team of four people who built Virgin Music Group's first website back in 94- 95. Did we keep any of it? did we ***! Bit of a shame really.
Ask your local archivist or archaeologist or local historian if they think anything is too small to be of use when researching the past.
What might be just as interesting ... (Score:3)
I'm not into the idea that a page has to change all the time to be worthwhile -- for a lot of businesses, I think updates once a year or so are fine. But unfinished pages (either commercial or personal) with Last Modified dates of, say, 1997 really puzzle me.
I'd rather see (Score:2)
But maybe that's just me.
Re:Who would've thought? (Score:1)
jred
www.cautioninc.com [cautioninc.com]
Fscked Company (Score:3)
another site (Score:1)
http://www.ebituaries.whirlycott.com/ [whirlycott.com]
Re:Why bother 70% of it is porn, the rest is adver (Score:1)
Lord Hugh must be trolling too much, I recognised him from your quote, even though his post has already reached the /. cemetery. Actually I probably read /. too much, but I can give it up any time, honest.
2nd post (Score:1)
somebody mod this as funny!! (Score:1)
A museum of defunct .coms ? (Score:2)
Dead sites, dead media (Score:3)
This ties is well with Story of the Pnuematic tubes [slashdot.org], a highly developed system that disappeared and became utterly forgotten because of other systems that were utterly superior to it. (Telephones. fax, etc.)
I also am fascinated by the Athenian "computer" that ran the old Athenian democracy. (see info here in 5 parts: 1 [deadmedia.org],2 [deadmedia.org],3 [deadmedia.org],4 [deadmedia.org],5 [deadmedia.org]) It was far more IT intensive than most folks realize.
So with these dead sites, etc the question comes to mind: What replaces the internet when it is over?
My vote is that the most likely course is the borgification of the world. Wireless, of course.
But of course, it could be something else as well.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip
Most ironic entry... (Score:3)
Sigh... (Score:1)
belly up happens all the time...and everywhere (Score:1)
Actually the internet gives quite a unreal view on bussinesses. Just go and check how many real-life businesses go belly up every year in your neigborhood/city. I'll bet you'd be anstonished to see how many there are. .com craze everything was so hyped that everyone saw the agony of these dying cyber-companies. I think that in a few years, going belly up as an ebusiness will go just as unnoticed as going belly up in the real world.
Why is the internet giving an unreal view? Well simply because a real company dies silently and with the
(Offtopic) Besides, the "Learn Java Quick" books are for 95% crap. You will learn to make a bit small stuff but never understand the real "why". If you already know the computer science theories that are behind it, you don't need "Learn Java Quick" anymore, but you can skip to the serious references.
Re:A museum of defunct .coms ? (Score:2)
But each grain as unique and beautiful as a fucken snowflake!! Ah, defunct dot-com's we hardly knew ye. Each tragedy the death of an entire potential universe. Nay, many universes, each. The conception of new profit making paradigms with infinite demographics nipped in the bud stings sharply. The bright light of truth burns the eyes and shatters the dreams of those that tried and failed. A dark world of paranoia and economic recession rises from the ashes of the old as we can only think wistfully of the splendor that once was. That Rome was built in a day, or nearly so.
the phone is ringin, o my god
Thats alot of .com's but.... (Score:1)
whistling past the cemetery (Score:1)
Systems were made to be circumvented.
Deadcom Hall of Fame? (Score:3)
In twenty years, I'll tell my daughter all about people pouring all of their cash into pets.com and she won't believe me. How long until the world forgets about boo.com? We need a place to wander the halls and say "remember them? I was so glad when they went under."
Of course, it's the semi-pro non-profit [ridiculopathy.com] sites that will survive this collapse with cockroach-like aplomb.
Web Sites in books (Score:1)
What's the deal with websites listed in books? Have you ever tried to go back to one of those websites from like 4 years ago? They don't last. They turn into "buy the updated version of the book". What kind of crap is that?
Okay, that's good for now.
Re:newbie alert. (Score:1)
Re:the current site. (Score:1)
it was some sort of trendy online clothing store. I remember reading some stuff about it in the newspapers, iirc boo was one of the first
Re:it's all worth preserving (Score:1)
Besides, do we want historians of the future thinking we're all perverts obsessed with some freak's butt?
The Science of Transmogrification (Score:2)
and I'll thank you not to denigrate this succesful science that I've so carefully tested.
(Then again, maybe a simple letter transposition is within the spirit of this great science!)
--Calvin
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newbie alert. (Score:1)
yeah, yeah. so i'm ignorant. but i keep seeing all these references to "boo.com" and wondering just what in the bloody hell it was. anyone have a synopsis?
--saint----
the current site. (Score:1)
it appears that their site is still up. Why don't you check that out first...
i did, but all that's on there is the usual "we're boldly going out of business" fluff about being the ultimate internet portal and rediscovering focus and such. i was wondering what the original idea was - looks like it was some sort of hipper-than-thou gen x boutique online, but impressions can be deceiving.
--saint----
Not gone, but changed (Score:2)
What did Yahoo!, Microsoft, Slashdot, et al look like when they first opened up shop? What did they look like on, say, November 21, 1999? Isn't there some sort of project to archive all this? I think it would be a valuable historical tool- a setting in one's browser that let's you enter any date, sending you back in time.
I'd like to see trenchcoat.org [trenchcoat.org] (a gag perpetrated by the freaks at rotten.com [rotten.com] ) before they switched to their "All Hate Mail" format.
Speaker for the Dead (Score:1)
toobad. (Score:1)
I would like to see snapshots of those sites in full bloom, rather than a dead skeleton.
Maybe Google can start a site using its cache,as Webthatwas.com or somethin
Re:Who would've thought? (Score:1)
We need businesses like that, because there's always a market for used office furniture.
dot com death (Score:1)
My hope (Score:2)
Re:Why bother 70% of it is porn, the rest is adver (Score:1)
Hahaha...oh, that's a good one.
(wipes tear from eye)
Ow, my sides. Pretty much trust conventional media...heehee...I got to remember that one...
Dead companies (Score:2)
Dying Dot-Coms (Score:2)
Here's my favorite warning sign of a dying dot-com:
3. Replaces 180 fulltime employees with two interns and a chatterbot.
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If there were gods, how could I bear to be no god?
Joey Ramone, R.I.P. (Score:1)
In a net semetary
Death & Life of the Internet (Score:2)
And that was over a year ago, when the world of the internet was still sailing high!
The cemetery will continue to grow, and people won't care. After all, who cares about the fact that Altos went out of business? Or that Synergistic Software is gone???
Why would we sites be any different? Let them rot, and let those who are tactiful and savvy win the moment.