GeoCities shutting down

[dleedlee]

Not really new news but may have been overlooked.
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/geocities/close/close-01.html

How is it Asian Movie related? Well, GeoCities hosted a lot of the older fan sites that contain troves of useful information.
Really, GeoCities was one of the forefathers to Wordpress, Blogspot, etc.

HKTopTen has already moved to the blogosphere. But many sites will fade into oblivion, no doubt. Some have been abandoned for years. So take a peek, or google your own favorites: yourfavorite topic site:geocities.com
If you have your own favorites, now's the time to archive it, the Internet Wayback Machine doesn't seem to archive them.

Some random samples:

Screen Queens of the 50's and 60's

http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Harbor/8097/

Remember The Heroic Grace tour? (cached)
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:O_7 ... clnk&gl=us

Chow Yun-Fat: God of Actors
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8907/factor.html
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8907/cyf_tvb.html - early TVB career

An article on Stephen Chiau (cached) (You know this one is old since it' says 'Chiau')
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:L1O ... clnk&gl=us

Two Degrees: Asian Cinema
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Set/ ... index.html

Bruceploitation

http://www.geocities.com/many_bruces/

Chinese Pop Stars
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/3966/index.html

Asian movies
http://www.geocities.com/pg7379/asian_movies.htm

A Brigitte Lin - Charlie Chin fan site
http://www.geocities.com/qxl_charliechin/

[Brian Thibodeau]

the Internet Wayback Machine doesn't seem to archive them.

This is something that's bothered me for a while now with the Wayback machine. There's a LOT of sites that don't seem to get archived anymore, including this one. If you search HKMDB there, you'll see that the archiving stops in Oct. 2007. One hopes, of course, that Archive.org doesn't one day go the way of the dodo, else we'll lose even the remnants of once-active sites. I know Bob once mentioned pillaging the archived HKMDB stuff for materials to save over to the current version of the site, but I doubt it's a priority anymore.

I knew about Geocities closing, but I never realized just how many cool HK-related sites were on there. I rarely visited because it more-or-less predated my own introduction to home-based internet browsing barely five or six years ago (surfed from work before that, when I was able to), and many of the sites look like unseemly design relics of a bygone era I was never actually party to--with an abundance of links to likewise-dead sites to reinforce the sadness of it all. The info that remains is precious in a way--even quaint--so it'll be a shame to see it disappear.

I have no doubt that in our lifetimes, we'll see other currently-popular components of the internet give up the ghost. An inevitable consequence of the short-attention-span culture the very internet gave birth to, perhaps? Imagine the graveyard of blogs that might exist some day before, say, Blogger.com decides it's time to roll up the carpet, each fronted with the inevitable "I just don't have time to do this anymore" pronouncement that pops up on so many Geocities pages. All of this is one key reason I still prefer the printed word--i.e. my books--over the internet for longevity and permanence.

Thanks for the links, Dennis. Hopefully the creators of some of these sites--if they even still care--will take advantage of the offer to upgrade their sites to Yahoo web hosting, then maybe some of these gems will survive.

[dleedlee]

re: Internet Wayback Machine
I don't think it's the Machine's fault. Individual sites, domains have the ability to block archiving.
Robots.txt Query Exclusion: A robots.txt is something that a site owner puts on their site that keeps crawlers like our own from crawling them. The Internet Archive retroactively respects all robots.txt.

Yeah, I didn't visit a whole lot of geocities sites regularly. But like I said, there's a lot of little nuggets in there by die hard fans of everything to accidently stumble upon when Googling. Some of those sites are long dead, yet the extant info is priceless. And they are quaint looking which adds to their unique charms.

Maybe it's projecting a heightened awareness of my own mortality, but I hope Bob has a succession plan in place for this site.

[Brian Thibodeau]

Maybe it's projecting a heightened awareness of my own mortality, but I hope Bob has a succession plan in place for this site.

It's not just you!

Bob would probably tell us not to worry--and I sincerely hope that would be the case--but the lack of helpful upgrades to the structure of the site (things that would allow us to craft more detailed and accurate DB entries, and make us more user friendly), coupled with the lack of updates from above in general, and the possibility that donations may be keeping us chugging along (based on a campaign that seems to have cooled off rather quickly), have given me pause. I kinda dread the thought of being forced to rely on the old, error-riddled archived versions of this site at the Wayback machine for future projects some day, or having no place to (eventually!) upload the credits and portraits of the million-and-a-half HK movies I've got here. It's too bad we're blocked over there, if that's even the case. I guess I'm too internets-illiterate to understand the harm in it, but perhaps being archived makes the "live" site more vulnerable to attacks?

[/quote]Yeah, I didn't visit a whole lot of geocities sites regularly. But like I said, there's a lot of little nuggets in there by die hard fans of everything to accidently stumble upon when Googling. Some of those sites are long dead, yet the extant info is priceless. And they are quaint looking which adds to their unique charms. [quote]

That's why I'm hoping some of the creators will port them over to Yahoo. As clunky as they seem in our enlightened (:lol:) times, there's an archival quality about them that's priceless considering some of them are barely a decade old!

[dleedlee]

Traipsing down Nostalgia Lane

Where can I buy HK movies? From another decade, another century!
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Towers/4 ... reHKMV.htm

Ode to the Humble VCD. It begins with:

This list of Frequently Asked Questions is aimed at people interested in Video CDs.
http://www.geocities.com/athens/forum/2496/vcdfaq.html

Laserdiscs!
http://www.geocities.com/columbiaisa/vi ... _intro.htm

[Brian Thibodeau]

Where can I buy HK movies? From another decade, another century!
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Towers/4 ... reHKMV.htm

And look, right at the top in big red letters, it says he's gonna update the website this weekend! Woo-hoo!!

Oh, wait a minute . . .

[dleedlee]

Somehow, it makes me more sad than ever that GeoCities is going away. These sites are like individual time capsules capturing each one's personal passion at a particular time or stage in their life.

This author has an odd combination of favorites: Chingmy Yau, Sandra Ng and Lam Ching-Ying

Certainly this gallery dedicated to Chingmy Yau deserves preservation from the bit bucket!
http://www.geocities.com/tokyo/dojo/878 ... c_gal.html

And what's to become of Shirley (Faye) Wong's midi files?
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Flats/1685/

[Brian Thibodeau]

Somehow, it makes me more sad than ever that GeoCities is going away.

There, there. It's OK. Let it out. Sometimes it's good to let . . . things . . . go . . . Hey, look! Those damned kids are on your lawn again!

Actually, you found some pretty cool stuff so far. Makes me wonder if some of these folks even realize their labours of love are still alive . . . for a time. I certainly hope many of them kept copies of their photos, text and even midis backed up on their computers in the event this might happen. I actually noticed a couple of sites still have forums structured very much the way they were a decade ago, and they're barely active, with a post seeming to pop up every few months or so. Frankly, I'm surprised anyone still bothers with a lot of such forums since pretty much every topic under the sun now has a selection of key websites that people gravitate towards to chat with like-minded souls.

It should be interesting to see what the internet in general looks like ten, twenty years from now. I think we'll see even more disappearing acts as time goes on and peoples' attitudes and needs morph it in entirely new directions. Good gawd, it might even turn out to be a fad nobody realized was a fad because it was so all-pervasive for so long!

I just hope the Hong Kong Movie Database is still there the day the web becomes sentient and destroys us all. Then I'd know all our efforts were not in vain.

[dleedlee]

There, there. It's OK. Let it out. Sometimes it's good to let . . . things . . . go . . . Hey, look! Those damned kids are on your lawn again!

I'm starting to walk towards the light... the bright, white light...

[ewaffle]

Brian wrote:

Good gawd, it might even turn out to be a fad nobody realized was a fad because it was so all-pervasive for so long!

Sounds like one of those restaurants where no one goes because it is always so crowded.

[Brian Thibodeau]

Sounds like one of those restaurants where no one goes because it is always so crowded.

It does, doesn't it? I guess that makes a good book--something tangible we can hold in our hands, something we can singularly focus on without jumping off to a million other "books" and wasting several hours--the equivalent of the "well-kept-secret" restaurant that's been around forever, is never crowded, and is more richly rewarding in the long run. The same analogy could be applied to watching movies in a comfortable living room on the big screen versus watching them sitting in front of a computer where we already spend too much time as it is.

Is it any surprisse that I increasingly find my young, text-obsessed coworkers to be so culturally, historically, politically and geographically illiterate? Considering a younger generation to be ridiculously self-possessed is nothing new--we've all been on the receiving end--but I think the advancements in technology of the last 20 years has made such an age-old observation more accurate than ever.

I think I'll take my lawnchair, fishing hat and large plastic sunglasses over to Dennis' house so we can both yell at the little punks to get off the lawn.

[Brian Thibodeau]

Sounds like one of those restaurants where no one goes because it is always so crowded.

It does, doesn't it? I guess that makes a good book--something tangible we can hold in our hands, something we can singularly focus on without jumping off to a million other "books" during the process and potentially wasting several hours--the equivalent of the "well-kept-secret" restaurant that's been around forever, is never crowded, and offers a more richly rewarding meal in the long run. The same analogy could be applied to watching movies in a comfortable living room on the big screen versus watching them sitting in front of a computer where, as a culture, we already spend so much time.

Is it any surprise that I increasingly find many of my young, text-obsessed coworkers to be so culturally, historically, politically and geographically illiterate? Labeling younger generations to be laughably self-possessed is nothing new--we've all been on the receiving end--but I think the advancements in technology of the last 20 years has made the age-old observation more astute than ever before.

I think I'll take my lawnchair, fishing hat and large plastic sunglasses over to Dennis' house so we can both yell at the little punks to get off the lawn.

[dleedlee]

Early Web Era Ends as Yahoo Shutters GeoCities

A web era came to an end Monday as Yahoo officially boarded up GeoCities, the long-neglected pioneer of personal web pages. GeoCities -- acquired by Yahoo in 1999 for $2.9 billion -- was once on the cutting edge of making it easy for individual users to publish their lives on the web, but long ago was eclipsed by the social-networking innovations of Facebook and MySpace.

In a posting on the GeoCities help page, Yahoo said: "We have enjoyed hosting web sites created by Yahoo! users all over the world, and we're proud of the community you've built. However, we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways."

Yahoo is pointing GeoCities users to its web-hosting service, which it said offers personalized domain names, matching e-mail, and a range of site-building tools.

Web 'Training Wheels'

"One of my first web sites was GeoCities way back in the day," reminisced social-media expert Chris Brogan in an e-mail. "It was great for giving us training wheels in using the web," said the coauthor of Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation and Earn Trust.

"It failed because the mission didn't matter once more robust tools came about. They weren't really good communities to begin with, but they were workable. Yahoo could've killed it five or six years ago and it'd be OK," Brogan added.

The closing underscores a prime concern of web historians -- sites like GeoCities may not contain earth-shattering content, but taken as a whole they represent an important step in understanding the web's evolution. For all those personal pages to be lost would create a hole in the social history of the Net.

Preserving the Early Web

Fortunately, many GeoCities pages will be preserved at the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library based in San Francisco. While the archive already hosts many GeoCities pages through its web spider, the organization is now actively encouraging GeoCities users to submit their pages directly.

"GeoCities has been an important outlet for personal expression on the web for almost 15 years," a statement on the archive's GeoCities Special Collection page says. "With the recent news from Yahoo that GeoCities is going to be discontinued on October 26, 2009, the Internet Archive is working over the next few months to ensure our collection of GeoCities sites is as deep and thorough as possible."

The site allowed users to self-organize into communities of interest. In 1998, user pages were organized into "neighborhoods" like Area51 for science fiction, CollegePark for university life, and TimesSquare for video and role-playing games. The site offered tools to build web sites, online chats, and e-commerce tools.

A look at the site in 1999, through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, shows the site offering this feature topic: "The 70s: Put on your bell-bottoms and ease on down to the disco! Take a trip back to those happenin' years."

The happenin' years of 1999 now seem a distant memory. Ten years later, most web creators think in terms of connecting to other users through Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. But back in the day, the site was a revelation to millions of new web creators. The tools were unsophisticated by today's standards and the results were generally disastrous by any objective design standard, but GeoCities proved there was a market of people eager to put themselves online, not just consume content from the likes of America Online.
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nf/20091026/tc_nf/69716

One last look
http://www.geocities.com/mybeststars/index.html

Vicky Zhao Wei and Alec Su in TV series Old House Has Joy

Swordgirl - Zhao Wei

Divine Retributiion
Lau Ching Wan and Adam Cheng

Fan Bingbing - Homeward Bound

[Brian Thibodeau]

Fortunately, many GeoCities pages will be preserved at the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library based in San Francisco. While the archive already hosts many GeoCities pages through its web spider, the organization is now actively encouraging GeoCities users to submit their pages directly.

Thanks for the update. Good to know the Internet Archive will be attempting to backlog as much of Geocities as possible. I sure wish they were still allowed to back up THIS site!

The closing underscores a prime concern of web historians -- sites like GeoCities may not contain earth-shattering content, but taken as a whole they represent an important step in understanding the web's evolution. For all those personal pages to be lost would create a hole in the social history of the Net.

Closings like this one should be a prime concern of anyone currently using any of the hot social networking sites. They're all bound to go this way, or be replaced by something better for--and by--the next generation. There's still no real permanence to the internet, despite the massive amounts of time we spend exploiting ourselves all over it these days, often for posterity. There oughta be a countdown clock on Twitter; small numbers of people have already started to leave it.