----- 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. 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