According to Mark Milian of the LA Times, Geocities was perhaps the first mainstream example of an open, participatory and personal Internet, its been there longer than I have been connected and, for years, any search of the web produced at least a couple of Geocities sites. It still attracts 10 million site visits a month but now, as Chris Crum writes, it is over. R.I.P. GeoCities: A Community is Killed

Yahoo has officially shut down Geocities.The company has said that it did not count the property among its priorities, so it is simply getting rid of it. Yahoo has shut down about 20 services in less than a year.

[...] Ok, so there are other options for GeoCities users, but is just shutting down a community that still attracts so much traffic the right thing to do? Yahoo's way of going about it has been widely questioned. According to Compete data, GeoCities has still been seeing over 10 million unique monthly visitors as recently as last month. Why would Yahoo want to just shut that down?

[...] It seems unwise from a business perspective, but what about the users? Does Yahoo have an obligation to its users who may have spent years using their GeoCities site only to have it pulled from the web? Should Yahoo provide a forwarding web address for GeoCities users?

MySpace isn't exactly at the peak of its popularity, but there are still tons of people who use it.

What if they just pulled everything? What if Google bought Facebook and decided to kill it? What if your Tweets vanished?

Sure these things seem unlikely now because these services are still fresh. Well, GeoCities was once the "it" thing too. Granted, most GeoCities sites I have seen are not much to look at now, but that doesn't mean people aren't getting use out of them. They're obviously getting page views.

OK, I accept that Yahoo! might have a commercial or operational reason for doing this, but shifting a site that may have been up for years, with all its files, is a huge job and not to offer some kind of simple migration to a blog for example is just bad PR.

Then there's the issue of millions of links to Geocities pages that will now vanish, again, an automated tool could set up forwarding to the new address for every page, but once Geocities closes, all that we'll have left is dead links.

This isn't the first such event, nor will it be the last, but as the internet ages, it will happen more often, hollowing out the whole system from the inside even as it grows at the edges. Yes, search engines will soon enough find those files that are transferred, but those that are not will mostly disappear, to be found only in google's cache if you really want it or in the wayback machine.

As the net becomes increasingly the memory of our collective mind, will it also be subject to an equally collective amnesia - or worse, Alzheimers?

Meanwhile, I'll continue to promote the many free tools available, from Facebook and Twitter to Ning, PBWorks, Flickr, YouTube, MyCommittee and so on.

Just remember that your rights under a free site are very limited and it can disappear tomorrow, don't keep irreplaceable material only where its free and preferably use tools that enable you to download the entire content to your hard drive in a single operation.

That may mean getting familiar with the old guys like FTP or finding tools with downloads using XML, but the moral will always be - backup!

What's your experience? Did you have a Geocities site? What free online services do you use and how do you rate them? In a pinch, how could you recover all the material you have posted there? Comments are open.

Share this post

Hide Sites

New Zealand is going through the throes of trying to figure out how to deliver real broadband internet access to all of us. despite the fact that 1.1 million of us have existing levels of broadband, the real deal is a different thing altogether. While we worry about how to spend a billion or so on the technology, one country at least is starting somewhere else. Finland First Country to Make Broadband a Legal Right [Read more →]

Share this post

Hide Sites

As more of us use photos in our work, its essential that the expertise to manage them gets embedded in the tools because the vast majority of us wont ever afford a copy or take a course in the high-end software with the coolest capabilities. Which is why I use the "I'm feeling lucky" photo correction on Picasa where I manage my digital photos and where a tool like paint.net comes into its own.

Originally intended as a replacement for the Windows Paint tool that packages with the operating system, it has taken on a life of its own as a graphics and photo editor.

Features
Every feature and user interface element was designed to be immediately intuitive and quickly learnable without assistance. ... The tabs display a live thumbnail of the image instead of a text description. This makes navigation very simple and fast.

Layers
Usually only found on expensive or complicated professional software, layers form the basis for a rich image composition experience. You may think of them as a stack of transparency slides that, when viewed together at the same time, form one image.

Active Online Community
Paint.NET has an online forum with a friendly, passionate, and ever-expanding community with a growing list of tutorials and plugins.

Special Effects
Many special effects are included for enhancing and perfecting your images. Everything from blurring, sharpening, red-eye removal, distortion, noise, and embossing are included. Also a 3D Rotate/Zoom effect that makes it very easy to add perspective and tilting.

Adjustments are also included which help you tweak an image's brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, curves, and levels. You can also convert an image to black and white, or sepia-toned.

Graphics Tools
Paint.NET includes simple tools for drawing, filling and altering shapes. Other tools include the Magic Wand for selecting regions of similar color, and the Clone Stamp for copying or erasing portions of an image. There is also a simple text editor, a tool for zooming, and a Recolor tool.

Unlimited History
Everybody makes mistakes, and everybody changes their mind. To accommodate this, every action you perform on an image is recorded in the History window and may be undone. Once you've undone an action, you can also redo it. The length of the history is only limited by available disk space.

Free!

I've worked with an old copy of Paintshop Pro for years and it does all these things, but every time I shift to a new computer, less frequently these days I admit, I have to find the original discs, PLUS the upgrade download to restore it to what I expect to find.

This looks like a reasonable replacement. If you use it, have an alternative, or decide to try, let me know how it goes.

Share this post

Hide Sites

Every time a major story breaks outside the ability of the corporate media to cover it, the quality of the coverage seems to change by orders of magnitude both in quality and quantity. Its first glimemrs occurred during the attack on the World Trade centre in 2001, but it didn't really hit its stridfe until about 2007 with the London underground attacks where journalists were outside the cordon but people with cellphones, and their cameras, were inside the cordon and rpeorting, flickr-ing, blogging, txting reports from the front lines. Since then we have been inside the Mumbai attack and now we also have twitter as a tool of civil disobedience.

The events of the last 10 days in Iran are a perfect example of how this new media thing works and the issues that arise from mass journalism, especially those of credibility and merging of duplicate reports.

One of the best thinkers on the future of journalism and the media is Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine who offers this take on Adding value in the new news ecosystem [Read more →]

Share this post

Hide Sites

In the late 1990s, Jayne Cravens co-wrote The Virtual Volunteering Guidebook with Susan Ellis. It is a free manual to help organizations involve online volunteers, as well as to use online tools to support all volunteers and now she is revising the Guidebook.

To help her out, go to her survey at Volunteers & Tech Tools.

If you ever have been a volunteer, or if you have ever worked with volunteers in any capacity -- side-by-side or as a manager/primary contact person -- she wants to hear from you to complete this survey regarding online tools to support volunteers.

This survey is NOT limited to USA-based activities.

By "volunteer", I mean someone who has provided some kind of work support without pay to a nonprofit organization, community-based group (such as a school), or government initiative focused on the community (such as a city-sponsored park cleanup).

When talking about your experience, you can talk about more than one organization. But remember that most questions relate to your experience only regarding volunteering or working with volunteers.

If for no other reason, its worthwhile doing the survey to see how organisatio0ns are now being expectedf to work with volunteers.

How did you go on the survey? What chimes with the way you work with your volunteers and what is still to come? Comments open as usual.

Share this post

Hide Sites