----- GHOST SITES #5 [October 3, 1996] ----- by Steve Baldwin (steve_baldwin@hotmail.com) The web has been bashed as a godless postmodern medium, but a recent spate of miraculous site resurrections suggests the opposite: the Supernatural at Work. How else to explain the spectacular reincarnation of a dead site like Web Review, which roared back to life with a Bacchanalian re-launch party in San Francisco. And Pathfinder's own OJ Central, moribund for months -- why does it now hum with news of the civic trial? Even Valujet's planes are flying again - and its new web site looks, well, surprisingly airworthy. Who, or what, is "re-animating" these dead sites? Is it genuine Redemption or a sinister plot to replace the "souls" of these sites with ActiveX. Please stay tuned -- in the meantime, here's this week's dead sites: with any luck at all, they'll have the good sense to stay dead. Oh, and in our very next issue, Ghost Sites will launch its Halloween Special - please check in: I promise you a very scary time. *---- THE HOLDEN CAULFIELD SERVER ----* ----- http://www.stardot.com/~lukeseem/holden/ Whenever I feel oppressed by the phoniness of the world, a few moments with The Holden Caulfield Server would jolt me out of my blues. I'd simply click a "submit" button and an inspired quote from J.D. Salinger's memorably screwed-up teenager would pop onto my screen -- a perfect use of web technology to enhance an old book and make it compelling for today's troubled cyberteens. Early this year, however, reclusive author Salinger pressured Luke Seeman to kill the site or face an expensive copyright infringement suit. Yeah, Salinger was right to defend his copyright -- but the whole sad affair makes me want to paraphrase Holden: "In every info superhighway I've gone to, all the intellectual property bastards stick together." [5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum *---- JEF'S NUDE OF THE MONTH ----* ----- http://www.well.com/user/jef/nude.html Think you're going to make a mint selling porn on the net? Hah! It's more likely that you'll be driven into the poorhouse, especially if your ISP charges you by the megabyte. Witness the cautionary tale of Jef Poskanzer, whose nudes were so popular that the Well was about to start charging him $750 per month if the popular nudes stayed online. They didn't, Poskanzer is now shopping for a cheaper ISP, and all you thrill-seekers can always check out The Louvre if you're in a lusty mood. Chris Stamper is credited with this find. He can be reached at Stamper.Com. [5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum *---- THE WAY: GOPHERSPACE ----* ----- http://www.infohiway.com/way/gof/c1.html As my colleague Chris Stamper notes, Gopherspace has been fatally injured by the rise of the Web, search engines and other info-gimmicks. Try it yourself: go to "The Way" and click on any of the venerable gophers which used to offer such a wealth of information. At least half of them are dead: the others seem frozen in 1995 or before. What's left in Gopherspace? To quote Stamper, "old Hotwired press releases, Lubavitcher tracts, and obscure syllabi from the 1993 Bard Physics department. It's sad but true. The crypt of Gopherspace makes the web's ghost sites look up to date." Of course, the death of Gopherspace means the death of Archie, Veronica, and Jughead, too, but I find this latter topic much too painful to discuss. [4 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, shows Advanced Decay *---- THE MENTOS FAQ ---- ----- http://www3.gseis.ucla.edu/~cjones/mentos/mentos-faq.html Certain Net fads spread like wildfire and then come to a screeching halt: witness the moribund Mentos FAQ page, which added its last morsel of Mentos-memorabilia in November of 1995. Why these artificial mints became such a fevered subject of discussion is beyond me -- nor can I explain why everyone suddenly packed up and stopped writing about Mentos. I suspect that demonstrating a comprehensive knowledge of Mentos suddenly became decidedly uncool on the West Coast, or some other artificial food came along to steal the conversational fire. In any case, I can only hope that the prestigious UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, which hosts this site, will commission an academic study committee to achieve some closure on this issue. Related URLs: http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/intro.html [3 GHOSTIES] Site is Dead, but Well-Preserved *---- SOVEREIGN SEVEN ----* ----- http://www.pathfinder.com/S7/s7preview.html This odd little site, based on a DC Comics series, is a real collector's item that's been buried deep within Pathfinder for almost a year. Created by talented web designer Matt Menko (unrelated to the artificial mint) Sovereign Seven was launched with great fanfare and left to slowly sink into oblivion. This is a strange site laced with major web nostalgia: Where else can you enjoy authentic server-push animation, scanned-in covers, a flaky and somewhat dysfunctional interactive "maze" game. I doubt this site will ever be as valuable as a 1941 Superman First Edition, but I'd recommend copying this site to your archive as soon as possible. In 50 years, copies of this site will be quite rare, and they're not making any more of them. Related URLs: http://www.pathfinder.com/S7/1_1.html [5 GHOSTIES] Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------