Remember GeoCities? Did you even notice it got shut down about a year ago? Yahoo bought GeoCities and took all the sites offline on October 27, 2009. For the uninformed, GeoCities was THE premiere place to get a free website a million years ago and all the websites looked like the worst MySpace page you’ve ever seen, times a thousand.
Looks aside, some of the sites probably contained useful information. There were an estimated 38 million pages, and there have been a handful of attempts to archive all of the data.
One of the more ambitious efforts surfaced on the one-year anniversary of GeoCities’ closing. The appropriately-named Archive Team has announced that it’ll be releasing 900 gigabytes-worth of GeoCities sites as a downloadable torrent.
According to the team’s blog post:
“This is going to be one hell of a torrent – the compression is happening as we speak, and it’s making a machine or two very unhappy for weeks on end. The hope had been to upload it today, but the reality is this is a lot of stuff – probably 900 gigabytes will be in the torrent itself. It’s not perfect, it’s not all – but it’s something.
Who will want this? Anyone who feels like browsing among the artifacts of yesterday, who wants some data to play with, who is doing research into history, who wants to get some mileage out of a few weblog postings of crazy glittery animated GIFs and MIDI music. It’s not for everyone. Some people will probably grab a few files out of the thousands of archives in the torrent, unhook and call it a day. Others will want all of it, every last bit, to put onto their $80 1TB hard drive they bought down at the local computer mart.
It is not clear when the torrent will go up, but if you’re interested in it, please mail into geotorrent@textfiles.com – you will get a one-time mailing when it’s up and waiting for you.”
That’s the craziest part—you can fit everything on a 1TB hard drive, which can be hard for well shy of $100.
[via DVICE]
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