Ghost Sites of the Web

Web 1.0 history, forgotten web celebrities, old web sites, commentary, and news by Steve Baldwin. Published erratically since 1996.

July 26, 2007

ProjectFlaunt.com Kicks The Bucket

ProjectFlaunt.com Kicks The Bucket
"Project Flaunt," located at the domain projectflaunt.com, was launched in 2000 or 2001; it provided an open-source gallery where users could submit many different kinds of digital objects, browse submissions made by others, and have these objects displayed at random.

We don't hear much about "random viewing" these days. Nobody does studies on the amount of total time spent randomly viewing things, hitting F5/reload, and being delighted or repelled at what comes up. We view random activities as a form of pointless frittering; the cyberspace equivalent of yo-yo'ing, or pulling a slot machine's lever repeatedly not to receive a payoff, but just to see whether all the cherries line up. But for a time randomness was celebrated on the World Wide Web, and Project Flaunt was among its foremost exponents.

Today, however, it's just a ghost site; it's author calls it, a bit bitterly, "a half-hearted little-effort.. an unpolished attempt at what others have done so brilliantly," before posting a link to Flickr.com.

Labels:

Detritus.Net is a Ghost Site

Detritus.Net is a Ghost SiteDetritus.Net, located at the domain Detritus.net, is a site "about making new creative works out of old ones, whether it be fine art or pop culture." In a way, this mission statement isn't too different from Ghost Sites'; our belief is that the seeds of a new digital spirit are often embedded in old and decaying digital objects. In effect, only by looking backward is it possible to see the way ahead.

Unfortunately, Detritus.Net appears to have been abandoned more than a year ago. The newest content on its home page is from May of 2006, the time its Blog was last updated. The site includes an automated image-rotator which loads a new image each time the site is loaded, so it's hardly devolved to static-ware. Still, it's not clear to me that anybody's home, and maybe that's not so bad, given that the term "detritus," after all, means "disintegrated or eroded matter."

Labels:



Click Here to Return to the Ghost Sites Home Page