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Ghost Sites 16
----- GHOST SITES #16 [May 27, 1998]
----- by Steve Baldwin
(steve_baldwin@hotmail.com)
Ghost Sites would like to lower a termite-ridden gangplank to the good
people from AOL who might be reading this column for the first time -
welcome aboard, gang!
This issue, we've dredged up a heavier than usual load of dead Web sites
which we hope will amuse, appall, and frighten the dickens out of you.
As usual, a healthy share of the digital phantoms featured in this issue
have resulted from your dead site reports - for this, our sepulcheral
research crew salutes you with a bony "thumbs-up"!
*---- AT&T 1996 OLYMPIC GAMES SITE ----*
----- http://198.152.185.34/txt/index.html
This fly-specked site is a grim testament to Olympic endurance that's
been chugging around an empty track for 21 pointless months. You can
still play Shockwave-based Olympic games here, but we don't recommend
watching the broken "live" camera focussed on Atlanta's Centennial Park,
or trying to enter the site's contest (somebody won the Grand Prize
almost two years ago).
You can, however, peruse "today's Olympic events" (a long-forgotten
Little Feat concert) and admire fading photos of Budweiser Bud World,
the Coca-Cola Pin-Trading Center, and General Motors' Century in Motion
Pavilion. (What better way to commemorate Olympic achievement than by
guzzling beer, cola, and high-octane gasoline?)
Want to protest this flabby brand of corporate-sponsored bit rot? Scrawl
the Olympics '96 URL on your next AT&T long distance bill, and write
"End the Olympic Madness" on your check.
Tell 'em the ghost of Jim Thorpe made you do it.
Related URLs:
http://198.152.185.34/txt/games/index.html
http://198.152.185.34/txt/copcamera/index.html
http://198.152.185.34/txt/sendoff/livecontest.html
http://www1.trib.com/CUMBERLINK/cumb/thorpe.html
[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum
*---- ENCYCLOPEDIA MOZILLA ----*
----- http://www.i-dea.com/spiritmm/graphics/mozilla/mozilla.htm
With truckloads of Windows 98 diskettes on their way to consumers,
Netscape's much-discussed air supply is dwindling to less than a quart,
so perhaps it's time to raise a farewell glass to Mozilla, Netscape's
endangered reptilian mascot.
Encyclopedia Mozilla - a spectral gallery of circa-1995 Mozilla images,
shows Netscape's cartoon lizard preening, posing, and being cute. This
poor green shlub is clearly oblivious to the fact that invisible
Microsoft e-mail memos circulating in the dead of night had already set
the exact date and time of his assassination.
Don't cry for Mozilla. Even if Netscape's browser share declines to
single digits by August, we expect Mozilla will soon play a crucial role
in resurrecting Netscape as a successful sweatshirt and stuffed animal
manufacturer.
Related URLs
http://www.i-dea.com/spiritmm/graphics/mozilla/moz4/moz4e.htm
http://merchant.netscape.com/netstore/LOGO/KIDS/KIDS_ITEMS/bud/556.html
[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum
*---- 1996: THE YEAR THE NET EXPLODED ----*
----- http://www.ibm.park.org/netexplode.html
Feeling nostalgic for over-hyped Web technologies of the past like IBM's
Bamba, Metaworlds, and VRML? Want to get a preview of exciting Net
events from December, 1996, or read pie-in-the-sky predictions of how
Network Computers and Digital Universities will change your life?
Blithe techno-boosterism reigns supreme on IBM's Small Planet Pavilion
site - a haunted project which might have morphed into a monthly
"journal on learning and culture in a networked world" if it hadn't
bored users to death with its soulless "written-by-committee" prose.
Surfing this site is like driving by the decaying temporary structures
of a bygone Worlds Fair - until Big Blue's bulldozers arrive, it
persists as a mindless celebration of Yesterday's Technology - Tomorrow!
Related URLs
http://www.ibm.park.org/indexTT.html
http://www.ibm.park.org/meta.html
http://www.ibm.park.org/vrml.html
http://www.ibm.park.org/dec.html
http://www.ibm.park.org/netcome.html
[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum
*---- TELLURIDE TIMES-JOURNAL ----*
----- http://www.adone.com/telluride/news.htm
Something dreadful seems to have happened on the slopes of this
fashionable Colorado ski resort. Mysterious "temporary problems"
overtook the Times-Journal's servers back in November - a glitch the
site reported "will be rectified shortly". Six months later, all that's
left is a frost-bitten news page and a fractured classified ads section.
Perhaps the Spring Thaw will unfreeze this newspaper's servers. Until
it does, we'll miss the Times-Journal's colorful reportage of
cocaine-peddling Telluride ski bums, vigilante elk, and paintball
shooting sprees.
It almost made us want to visit the place.
Related URLs
http://www.adone.net/ttj/class.htm
[4 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, Shows Advanced Decay
*---- ANTHONY'S MOST ANNOYING OF THE WEB ----*
----- http://www.annoyances.com/annoying.html
This quirky site looks dead (it claims it hasn't been updated since
January 27), but it might just be playing an annoyingly convincing game
of possum.
If you're a connoisseur of web junk, you'll love Anthony's Most Annoying
site, because it's one of the cleverest spoofs and most excruciating
object lessons in the various annoyances Web users take in stride,
including ghastly graphics, nettlesome error messages, and
seizure-inducing blink tags.
If you do only one thing while visiting this site, click on Anthony's
"Awards" page: a maddening gallery of GIFs from just about every two-bit
web award program in creation.
The majority of these award links are, naturally, broken and bitrotten.
Related URLs
http://www.annoyances.com/awards.html
[2 GHOSTIES] Site is Dying in ICU
*---- THE SENSUOUS TIMES ----*
----- http://www.sensuoustimes.com/
Sensuous Sabrina tells the world she closed her site down to give her
time "to do other things in life" - perhaps to spend more time thinking
about how much money she'll make by auctioning the "sensuoustimes.com"
domain name to the highest bidder.
This cash-hungry site even goes so far as to implore prospective domain
name speculators to "Check out our hit counter below and see the large
amount of traffic this domain has received!".
When we skulked by this site on May 24th, the daily hit count was a
meagre 15 users - probably not enough traffic to build much of a porn
empire.
[3 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, but Well-Preserved
*---- CRAZYWEB ----*
----- http://www.crazyweb.ru/
This Russian site claims to be the "first online Web magazine in Russia,
for Russians, and in Russian", and while all this might be true,
CrazyWEB hasn't been blessed with an update for eight months. Launched
in 1995 to serve as "the hottest Russian Cyberspace hangout in the
upcoming years", CrazyWEB contains several oddly inspired, but very
dusty features, including "Totem" (clearly influenced by Wired's Fetish)
and a Moscow radio feed that still miraculously works (although we can't
verify that it's live).
Even though CrazyWEB is as dead as Lenin's New Economic Plan, it's a
useful jumping off point for people interested in investigating the
truly bizarre things going on in Russia these days, and it even
contains some oddly subversive links back to the West which might
otherwise go unnoticed.
Related URLs
http://www.crazyweb.ru/about-x.htm
http://www.crazyweb.ru/totem-x.htm
http://www.101.ru/live.ram
[4 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, Shows Advanced Decay
*---- WWWENCH ----*
----- http://www.publicshelter.com/wench/
For two years, author and film-maker Jayne Loader produced WWWench: a
monthly column which painted a stark, uncompromising, and often very
funny picture of American life in the late 1990's.
Unfortunately, WWWench has recently fallen into disuse (last update:
December 1997). Loader hasn't stopped writing - in fact, she's
working feverishly on a book - an "Old Media" pursuit which pays the
bills. This activity has, however, put WWWench on indefinite hiatus, at
least until Loader can figure out a way to make a few pennies from the
site.
WWWench's content will be missed. Loader's accounts were both
well-written and extensively hyperlinked; two qualities which placed her
column head and shoulders above first-person "rants" written by lesser
talents.
Related URLs
http://www.publicshelter.com/wench/97/971115.html
[1 GHOSTIE] Site is Calling in Sick
*---- CLUB NYC'S GUIDE TO NEW YEAR'S EVE 1997 ----*
----- http://www.clubnyc.com/NewYearsEve/
This obsolete merrymaking site persists like a bad hangover that a
boxcar full of Bufferin can't erase, and we thank Chris Perry for
bringing it to our attention.
Why do holiday exploitation sites like this one hang around for eons?
The reason is quite simple: like stopped clocks that are right twice a
day, these sites live in suspended animation until the calendar rolls
around again. Then, with a few minor updates, they're recommissioned
with a yawn by the webmaster. Pretty efficient, eh?
Holiday hangover sites seem to be an especially virulent problem on
homepage hives such as Tripod and Geocities, where these comatose
holiday zombies blight large areas of land with atavistic cheer. A few
zealots have even announced the birth of a Christmas All Year Long
movement to rationalize their fanatical laziness.
My advice to you is to partake of dead holiday sites with extreme
caution - we know that if we run into Bif, the chirpy elf in Santa's
Mailroom, one more time, we'll be tempted to reach for the strychnine.
Related URLs
http://members.tripod.com/~cmurchison/holidays/xmaswish.html
http://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/2540/xmaspage.html
http://members.tripod.com/~ssue/christmas.html
http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/7523/allyear.html
http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/Glade/9262
[3 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, but Well-Preserved
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Copyright 1996-1999 Steve Baldwin Associates.
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