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Ghost Sites 27

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Published in 
Ghost Sites
 · 5 years ago

  




----- GHOST SITES #27 [June 8, 1999]
----- by Steve Baldwin

(steve_baldwin@hotmail.com)




There was much wailing and tribulation in Ghost Sites' musty research
room when, two weeks ago, Pathfinder's URL was finally redirected to
TIME.COM. The great site had finally disappeared beneath the waves,
entombing within it one of the Net's last great unexplored repositories
of Hopelessly Obsolete Content. The Pathfinder Museum, however, still
offers a glimpse of many reliquary objects left behind by The Lost Web
Pioneers.

The wailing continued when, for the first time in Ghost Sites history,
we missed our May issue - this omission representing yet another
commentary on our miserable state of overwork, URL sloth, and FTP lag.
But with the NetSlaves project winding its way to completion this month,
perhaps more normalcy will prevail. I also apologize for the laggardly
movement of information concerning remaining T-shirts -- (we've got a
lot of XL shirts left, folks, but not much else).

Anyway, getting back to the carnage: we were saddened to learn that Adam
Curry's MetaVerse site, which sojourned on for at least three years
without a single update from Adam, has finally been turned off and
redirected elsewhere.

We blame ourselves for this tragedy - one readers speculates that
traffic from Ghost Sites lit up all kinds of alarm bells at MetaVerse's
ISP, and a Barbarian System Administrator removed the Curry archives
from the Web in a pique of rage.

Related URLs:
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Station/4122/index.html
http://www.disobey.com/netslaves/
http://metaverse.com/vibe/index.html


*---- IFUSION ----*
----- http://www.ifusion.com/

iFusion was a "push pioneer" which flamed out in the general
conflagration of the so-called "Push" industry a few years back. The
original site is gone with the wind, but an extraordinary remnant at
iFusion.Com serves as a timeless memorial to all the people who built
iFusion's doomed ArrIve product.

At this ironically-flavored site, which proudly announces "The Internet
Ate Us for Dinner", one can study a ghostly gallery of former iFusion
workers, who evidently worked very hard to bring their product to
market. It's impossible to tell when these extraordinarily poignant
photographs were taken, but it appears that nobody in these pictures had
any inkling of the grim future that lay ahead.

[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum


*---- STRIP TEASE ----*
----- http://strip-tease.com/

Get ready for your own "personal peek at the wild world of STRIPTEASE -
a new film from Castle Rock Entertainment opening in theaters June 28,
1996."

As Sarah Mason notes, the site is "all messed up". Bad links abound,
along with advisories to "use Netscape 2.0". The site's postcards don't
work, nor does the "sad little game" that Mason tried to play on the
site.

I'm not a big Demi Moore fan, but realize that StripTease has begun to
enjoy considerable cult status as one of the worst movies ever made.
News of this dead site's persistence -- 3 years is a long time to
survive in today's update-happy publishing environment -- will only add
to the film's strangely growing allure.

[4 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, Shows Advanced Decay


*---- MELROSEAST ----*
----- http://opelka.com/~mvo/MelrosEast.html

If you've dug through the Ghost Sites archives, you know that American
Cybercast's infamous Spot site is still alive, although it hasn't been
updated in years. But the Great Soap Opera Craze of 1996-97 produced
many other small, speculative episodic content projects that are equally
ancient, and many are still scattered around the Web in a state of
suspended animation.

MelrosEast is an obscure Ghost Soap that's been lying in state since
July of 1997. It evidently published 27 episodes of drama that recounted
the lives of 20-something Long Island people as they hopped from mall to
bedroom to beach house, but didn't save any of its episodes online.

A few fragments of MelrosEast's episodes remain, and they're so laden
with the cartoonish pop culture elements which loom in the characters'
lives that the drama seems curiously dated, and makes the world of 1997
seem like some faraway time (did people really have personal coaches in
the 1990's? Did they really listen to Van Halen when they did their
nails?)

Related URLs:
http://www.thespot.com/
http://opelka.com/~mvo/mel27.html

[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum


*---- WORLD GUIDE TO VEGETARIANISM ----*
----- http://www.veg.org/veg/Guide/index.html

David Smead makes an excellent observation when he reported this site as
being "moldy". As Smead notes, "not only has the site not been updated
since February 1996, but there's a note at www.veg.org/veg/People/contrib.html
promising a major redesign "that should bear fruit in August/1998." Now,
that's old!

Smead also makes note of the fact that this site still points to
Point.Com's "Top 5% Award" program - a standard mark of the bitrotten
Web site.

I'm sure that many of the restaurants listed in this guide are still
going concerns. But if you really want to use this site to plan a
Vegetarian Trip, call ahead to see if the restaurant still exists.

Related URLs:
http://www.veg.org/veg/People/contrib.html

[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Musum


*---- OH, THE HUMANITY ----*
----- http://www.ohthehumanity.com/

This wonderful guide to "the worst movies ever made" stopped updating
itself in August of 1998, and it's really too bad. Bad Movies, like Bad
Web Sites, are endlessly fascinating conversational subjects, and
watching enough of them might even be a little-known cure for
depression.

Oh, The Humanity had a lot going for it - a wicked attitude, a nice
smirky look, user-submitted reviews, voting, and even links from each
Bad Movie review to a place where users could buy, rent, or further
investigate each of these celluloid turkeys on demand.

Perhaps this site will stage a comeback sometime soon - Bad Movies,
after all, aren't an endangered species. But good ideas for Web content
sites aren't easy to come by.

Thanks to Mori for sending this URL in to us.

Related URLs:
http://www.ohthehumanity.com/whats.html
http://www.ohthehumanity.com/movframe.html

[5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Musum


*---- THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE CPU ----*
----- http://www.processor.org/

Here's another original content site we hope gets back on its feet. The
Brotherhood of the CPU has only been dead since February, so there's
still a lot of valuable content here for CPU gear-heads, but things are
starting to drift out of date, and a few broken links are starting to
creep into its elegant, resource-frugal design.

We hope that The Brotherhood's main author, Luis Felipe de Melo Moura,
catches up on his thoughtful reviews, discussions, and comparative
evaluations of today's bewildering array of Intel and non-Intel CPUs.

[1 GHOSTIE] Site is Calling in Sick


------------------------------------------------------------------------
The website edition includes images, a nice design, and all the latest
news about Ghost Sites. Go there to read the latest:

http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/

Copyright 1996-1999 Steve Baldwin Associates.
Webdesign, hosting and publication by Disobey.

http://www.disobey.com/

TO SUBSCRIBE: majordomo@disobey.com BODY: Subscribe GhostSites
TO UNSUBSCRIBE: majordomo@disobey.com BODY: Unsubscribe GhostSites
------------------------------------------------------------------------

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